1 Aug
2020
1 Aug
'20
7:31 p.m.
during the mid 80s, i was preparing one of the first
invited talks for
USENIX on the subject of regular expressions.
i had concocted a massive RE that matched all the known spellings of
saddam hussein. (it was complicated,
I wonder if that was the inspiration for the Qaddafi torture test; see
http://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume9/fastgrep/part01 (June 87)
The first time I saw "p[-1]" was looking at some regexp source. It
blew/expanded my mind.