[COFF] [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Clem Cole]

below...

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 1:49 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:

> Thank you.  Some additional clues: the jargon file started at SAIL, and shortly
> after was adopted by MIT and then jointly maintained.  So it's
> not clear which one is "the PDP-6" here.  As far as I know, Bill Weiher, the
> creator of STOPGAP and/or SOS?, is associated with SAIL, not MIT.
>
You are welcome. I'm sorry to confuse the origin and the historical
correction. I was using the docs I had, and as you pointed out, the Jargon
says PDP-6 but does not specify which site. My notes from the later PDP-10
pointed at DEC+MIT. It does sound like STOPGAP/SOS came to the DEC world
from Stanford. So thank you.

That said, bring it back to the original question from Will.   My original
email was about the history of using reg-ex WRT to UNIX. It was less about
editors and who did what as much as trying to point out that the idea of a
text editor existed long before Ken's version of QED, much less, ed(1).    Most
importantly, Ken's QED came after the original QED, which came after other
text editors. Adding reg-ex to an editor was natural for someone schooled
in the ideas behind automaton and pattern matching. But tmany/most of the
text editors in used had been created before that work had begun to be
studied and formalized, so, these other editors had not included using
reg-ex for the pattern match/search scheme.

Ken's great leap was modeling and combining the QED user interface with
this new idea in text pattern match/searching, demonstrating that it was a
good fit. That would lead to other tools that decided to include the same
pattern-matching ideas (grep, sed, awk, Perl, *et al.*).

Will had asked -- how did people learn to use reg-ex?  The observation I
had made and was bringing forward to the list is that if new user came from
a background based on being taught about how to create a pattern match er,
and sid person had learned a little about the ideas behind automatons,
learn to use reg-ex was not a big deal.  It was only 'astonishing,' and
users might need a separate explanation if they started from some other
place - particularly if they did not have that same background in core CS
theory/they had previously learned a different way with a different set of
tools, such as the text editor.

As I understand it, this is how Will came to learn UNIX, so folks like Will
needed and appreciated documentation that came from other places. I think
that he was asking which documents and what people in the background
similar to him had chosen to use to learn how to use the UNIX toolkit.


Clem
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