From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera@...>
Date: 2003-04-16T07:41:32+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expressions

> Then I started thinking:  We have Perl-style regexps, right?  What other
> style regexps are there?  I'm sure people have come up with a number of
> different ideas, but a quick Google didn't turn up anything.  Does anyone
> know of any other ideas?

Well... there sort of are other styles, but not really...
All styles are very very similar.

I guess it all started with the shell's "wildcards", which were extended 
by grep, awk and sed.  Then came Perl which extended those again.

Each extension caused a slight change in syntax, and an increase in 
functionality.  Thus, you will find that they are all very similar, but 
not quite identical (and each is a functional superset than its ancestor).

> I'm just convinced that whoever came up with the current standard syntax
> (was it Chomsky?) was *not* implementing them on a computer over the ASCII
> alphabet.

If my theory of (RE) evolution is correct, it would suggest that as 
functionality was added, the syntax was forced to migrate to more remote 
regions of the keyboard.

-- I think I'll call this the "Carrera theory of evolution" :)

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant.  Math Dept.
University of Maryland.  (301) 405-5137