[TUHS] regex early discussions

[Alec Muffett]

On Mon, 4 Mar 2024, 03:38 Larry McVoy, <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> Marc is right.  I'll add that I grew up in terminal rooms, a bunch of
> kids connected to a VAX 780, like 40 or more.  I have no idea how the
> kids ahead of me learned but I learned by looking at their terminal
> and going "what did you just do?".
>
> My real understanding of regex is from Henry Spencer's regex.
>

I have a similar story; I landed in Unix circa 1987 because the computer
science students at UCL were all raving about Unix / the Pyramid (Did we
pass unused cspyr accounts around the college nerd undergraduate
underground? Nooooooo, we would never have done that, that would be
"hacking…") and finally the physics department got some Suns too play with.

I bought the Bourne book to navigate the basic shell utilities and of
course there was source code (which we also weren't meant to have access
to, etc etc) - but from my world "regexp" were a fuzzy concept defined by
sed and grep (and various grep reimplementations) until Perl arrived and
sedimented (crowned?) Henry's implementation.

And that's why we call it PCRE.

-a
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