Since Steve has mentioned it, this and much more about regular expressions
and their implementations may found at
Highly recommended.
Arnold
"Steve Johnson" <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
If you haven't seen it, check out Ken
Thompson's brilliant paper on
compiling regular expressions. The date was 1968... In effect, he
built a JIT to do regular expression searches (on an IBM 7094, no
less!).
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&…
The earliest reference is a paper by Kleene in 1956. In fact, I
recall that * was sometimes called "the Kleene star" in the day...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
To:"ron minnich" <rminnich(a)gmail.com>
Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Sent:Sun, 9 Jul 2017 17:55:50 -0400
Subject:[TUHS] Regular Expressions (was Re: origin of the name 'glob')
On 7/9/17, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
All the DEC-10 and 11 operating systems I used had that wildcard,
as well
as IIRC even the PDP-8, maybe someone can confirm
the -8.
It would have been nice had RE's been the standard way to glob
files, but,
that said, when I mention .*.c to people instead
of *.c they don't
much
like it.
So when were REs first designed and implemented? I would imagine that
they came about as a way to extend the old '*' and '?' wildcard
syntax, but that is only a guess.
-Paul W.