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Failed to connect to MySQL: (1203) User howardkn already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connectionsPath: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ben Bacarisse Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Lisp history: IF, etc. Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 17:44:01 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 22 Message-ID: <87pluondm6.fsf@bsb.me.uk> References: <86h6gjpq3i.fsf_-_@williamsburg.bawden.org> <86cyr6pb2l.fsf@williamsburg.bawden.org> <875xwy412p.fsf@nightsong.com> <868r1up0wk.fsf@williamsburg.bawden.org> <871q7m3wrj.fsf@nightsong.com> <86zfu9ooux.fsf@williamsburg.bawden.org> <87frw03b4j.fsf@nightsong.com> <877chbfs00.fsf@yaxenu.org> <87r0f61jkb.fsf@nightsong.com> <87il0iynlu.fsf@nightsong.com> <87edb5yxn5.fsf@nightsong.com> <87a5lszqvp.fsf@nightsong.com> <875xwgzal9.fsf@nightsong.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 18:44:02 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="39e43a1f7f1a3f90c725b40bf55e0b25"; logging-data="1794752"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+D9V1MuqW8D9QFCZ4RGrwT+miZHDmxjYU=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:30nsWKJD86g/n+uzcKn77XtSjos= sha1:b7Vnuj0iD5kd6zl5zcW6kiohWys= X-BSB-Auth: 1.db2f71553c2c871e90fe.20240417174401BST.87pluondm6.fsf@bsb.me.uk Bytes: 2741 Paul Rubin writes: > Lawrence D'Oliveiro writes: >> Was it a matter of timing, then? Perl came along at just the point where >> the hardware was powerful enough to take the complexities of regular >> expressions in its stride, so that’s when the whole idea really took off. > > Unix had regular expressions because Thompson's QED editor on some weird > old GE(?) minicomputer had had them. It compiled the regexex into > machine code, iirc. Perl was sort of Awk on steroids and Awk also had > regexes. I think regexes per se were never very cpu or memory hungry. > > Snobol and Spitbol didn't have regexes. They did pattern matching by > brute force backtracking. By that era though, computers had much more > memory than they did when Lisp 2 was happening. SNOBOL's patterns were much more "procedural" than REs. For example, you could implement Russell's paradox in SNOBOL: a pattern that matches only those patterns that don't match themselves. -- Ben.