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From: Wolfgang Agnes <wagnes@jemoni.to>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
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Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2024 13:50:58 -0300
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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?