George Michaelson writes:
> Regular expressions as a field of study goes back a long way.  SNOBOL
> was 62-67 and Bell labs.
>
> globbing was the application of specific syntax markers to concepts,
> which were well understood from all kinds of applied CS fields.
> parsing, lexical analysis, linguistics, grammer, you can probably draw
> a wobbly line from ? and * all the way back to chimpsky grammer
> glasses s/gl/cl/g

Actually, this goes back to Kleen in 1956, followed by Thompson in 1968.

Jon