Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

[...]

Perl was the language that made regular expressions sexy. Because it made
them easy to use.

>
For those of us who used regexps in Unix from the beginning it's not
that shiny as you want us to buy it; Unix was supporting Chomsky-3
Regular Expressions with a syntax that is still used in contemporary
languages. Perl supports some nice syntactic shortcuts, but also
patterns that exceed Chomsky-3's; too bad if one doesn't know these
differences and any complexity degradation that may be bought with it.

By Chomsky-3 you mean a grammar of type 3 in the Chomsky hierarchy?  And
that would be ``regular'' language, recognizable by a finite-state
automaton?  If not, could you elaborate on the terminology?

More interesting to me is the fascinating fact that on some non-Unix
platforms it took decades before regexps got (slooooowly) introduced
(even in its simplest form).

Such as which platform?