[COFF] [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Will Senn]

On 3/5/24 10:34 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> 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
>
Yup. I was curious about exactly that and the answers fit the bill 
nicely. I knew that Ritchie & co. were mathy cs types, but it didn't 
occur to me that the rest of the unix folks were, as well. A little 
reflection and it became somewhat obvious. Sure, there were plenty of 
exceptions, but then, they had mathy cs types to lean on. Coming at it 
from the new millennium, it's hard to grok the early days, or recreate 
the aha moments. I'm just using Unix explorations as motivations for 
deeper study of CS stuff that interest me, personally. When I picked up 
the AWK book the other day, regex popped out at me as a deficiency 
(sure, I use them all the time, but mastery... not even close... a lot 
of the time, it's like magic...) so, rather than just start coding up a 
bunch of regexes, I thought I would find out a bit more about their 
genesis - not the research that led to their discovery or perfection (I 
have no mathy interest), but rather how they came into common use (the 
pragmatics, as it were). This led to me asking about the gestalt of the 
60's / 70's and suchlike. For me, this is a bit like virtual reality, 
where I can immerse myself in what it might have been like and how it 
might have unfolded while tooling around like it is 1969 all over again. 
Thankfully, for a lot of y'all it's lived history and by willingly 
sharing so freely, you enrich the real-feel of the simulation :).

Later,

Will



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