[TUHS] regex early discussions

[arnold at skeeve.com]

I learned regular expressions from Kernighan & Plauger's book
"Software Tools". I was exposed to that book, Unix (v6 on a PDP-11)
and C programming (via K&R's book) all at the same time. This was in
the fall of 1980.

"Software Tools" changed my life.

Arnold

Dave Long <dave.long at bluewin.ch> wrote:

> Did `learn` have a regex module? (my memory* does not suffice, and
> I didn't even manage to get google to tell me if it were learn(1) or
> learn(6), so please forgive the imprecision of this response)
>
> -Dave
>
> * although I do recall this was how I learned one of ed(1) or vi(1)
>
> > On 4 Mar 2024, at 08:10, Otto Moerbeek via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> > 
> > On Sun, Mar 03, 2024 at 07:03:39PM -0700, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > 
> >> Will, here's my recollection, when I got to UNIX in late 1972 or
> >> thereabouts:
> >> 
> >> First, there was ed. grep and sed were derived from ed, so came along
> >> later. awk came along way later.
> >> 
> >> There were only manual pages. You typed "man ed" and there it was. The man
> >> pages were very accurate, very clear, and very authoritative. Many found
> >> them too succinct, especially as UNIX got more popular, but all of us back
> >> in the day found them perfect. Maybe you had to read the man page a few
> >> times to understand it, but at least that's all you had to read. No need to
> >> hunt around for more documentation!
> >> 
> >> (Well, there was more documentation: The source code, which was all online.
> >> But reading the ed source to understand regular expressions was impossible.
> >> It was in assembler, and Ken was generating code on the fly as the
> >> expression was compiled.)
> > 
> > I like to add that there was also quite a large set of additional
> > documentatiomn (Volume 2, Voilume 1 were the man pages), which
> > includes "Advanced Editing on UNIX" giving many examples on the use of
> > regexes in ed(1).
> > 
> > I do remeber reading a lot from Volume 2, as CS students in Amsterdam
> > we received printed and bound copies of both Volume 1 and 2. So in my
> > case, "only man pages or source" is not true. Having paper versions
> > was importent, because access to terminals for students was limited
> > (until I became a teaching assistent, which came with privileges,
> > including 24h access to terminals)
> > 
> > -Otto
> > 
> >> 
> >> Also, it should be noted that ed produced a single error message: a
> >> question mark. No wasting of teletype paper!
> >> 
> >> The motivation for learning regular expressions was that that's how you
> >> edited files. ed was the only game in town.
> >> 
> >> (sh used a greatly restricted form of regular expressions, which were
> >> documented on the sh man page.)
> >> 
> >> Marc Rochkind
> >> 
> >> On Sun, Mar 3, 2024 at 6:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Hi All,
> >>> 
> >>> I was wondering, what were the best early sources of information for
> >>> regexes and why did folks need to know them to use unix? In my recent
> >>> explorations, I have needed to have a better understanding of them, so I'm
> >>> digging in... awk's my most recent thing and it's deeply associated with
> >>> them, so here we are. I went to the bookshelf to find something appropriate
> >>> and as usual, I've traced to primary sources to some extent. I started with
> >>> Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, and I won't knock it (it's one of
> >>> the bestsellers in our field), but it's much to long for my personal taste
> >>> and it's not quite as systematic as I would like (the author himself notes
> >>> that his interests are less technical than authors preceding him on the
> >>> subject). So, back to the shelves... Bourne's, The Unix Environment, and
> >>> Kernighan & Pike's, The Unix Programming Evironment both talk about them in
> >>> the context of grep, ed, sed, and awk. Going further back, the Unix
> >>> Programmer's Manual v7 - ed, grep, sed, awk...
> >>> 
> >>> After digging around it seems like folks needed regexes for ed, grep, sed
> >>> and awk... and any other utility that leveraged the wonderful nature of
> >>> these handy expressions. Fine. Where did folks go learn them? Was there a
> >>> particularly good (succinct and accurate) source of information that folks
> >>> kept handy? I'm imagining (based on what I've seen) that someone might cut
> >>> out the ed discussion or the grep pages of the manual and tape them to
> >>> their monitors, but maybe I'm stooopid and they didn't need no stinkin'
> >>> memory device for regexes - surely they're intuitive enough that even a
> >>> simpleton could pick them up after seeing a few examples... but if that
> >>> were really the case, Friedl's book would have been a flop and it wasn't
> >>> :). So seriously, if you remember that far back - what was the definitive
> >>> source of your regex knowledge and what were the first motivators for
> >>> learning them?
> >>> 
> >>> Thanks,
> >>> 
> >>> Will
> >>> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> -- 
> >> *My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
>
>