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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/5/24 10:34 AM, Clem Cole wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAC20D2MPVUeojRCVLORaymC_ZPX9v7wvf9YbrQx9OsDsFSdjOw@mail.gmail.com">
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<div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#0000ff"><span
class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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</span><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> 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.</span></font>
<div><font color="#0000ff"><span class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">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.</font></div>
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<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font
color="#0000ff">Clem</font></div>
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</blockquote>
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 :). <br>
<br>
Later,<br>
<br>
Will<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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