[TUHS] regex early discussions

[Dave Long]

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>*