Antimirov and Mosses proposed a rewrite system for deciding the equivalence of two (extended) regular expressions. In this paper we present a functional approach to that method, prove its correctness, and give some experimental comparative results. Besides an improved version of Antimirov and Mosses’s algorithm, we present a version using partial derivatives. Our preliminary results lead to the conclusion that, indeed, these methods are feasible and, generally, faster than the classical methods.