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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 17:44:01 +0100
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Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> writes:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> 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.