[TUHS] regex early discussions

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Hi Ralph.

Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi Arnold,
>
> > 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.
>
> An excellent book.  What I think you've not mentioned is that it
> implements regular expressions.  Being inside the black box can aid
> understanding, including the performance of the matcher and the way the
> regexp is best written for a particular matcher.

Quite true.

> Kernighan and Pike's ‘The practice of programming’ also briefly
> implements some regexp functionality when talking about the power of
> notation.

What I didn't quite remember when I wrote the earlier note was that
at the same time as I was learning C, Unix and software tools, I took
a compiler course, using the first edition of the dragon book, which
covered regular expressions, NFAs and DFAs.

It all came together at the same time.

Arnold