[TUHS] regex early discussions

[Otto Moerbeek via TUHS]

On Mon, Mar 04, 2024 at 08:10:26AM +0100, Otto Moerbeek via TUHS 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)

https://wolfram.schneider.org/bsd/7thEdManVol2/ shows the contens of
Volume 2 (level ranges from introductionary tutorial to interals of
the compiler)

> 
> 	-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>*