Announcing PyCs, a new Python-like language on .Net

[Terry Reedy]

"Roy Smith" <roy at panix.com> wrote in message 
news:roy-5662B4.09003502092004 at reader1.panix.com...
> Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote:
>> I imagine regexps have been around long before perl, though I might be
>> wrong.
>
> Regex's were around long before Perl.  I first saw regex in about 1977
> or so when I was learning Unix v6.  They were used extensively in ed,
> sed, grep, awk, and maybe a few other tools.  Perl grew up sometime in
> the 80's, in an attempt to unify all those tool (plus shell) into a
> single language.

Regexes were invented by Stephen Kleene in the context of formal languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Kleene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions
I believe in the 1950s
The * operator once (and still is by some people) called the Kleene star.


Terry J. Reedy