[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Clem Cole 

    > the idea of a text editor existed long before Ken's version of QED,
    > much less, ed(1). Most importantly, Ken's QED came after the original
    > QED, which came after other text editors.

Yes; some of the history is given here:

  An incomplete history of the QED Text Editor
  https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qed.html

Ken would have run into the original on the Berkeley Time-Sharing System; he
apparently wrote the CTSS one based on his experience with the one on the BTSS.

Oddly enough, CTSS seems to have not had much of an editor before. The
Programmer's Guide has an entry for 'Edit' (Section AH.3.01), but 'edit file'
seems to basically do a (in later terminology) 'cat >> file'. Section AE
seems to indicate that most 'editing' was done by punching new cards on a
key-punch!

The PDP-1 was apparently similar, except that it used paper tape. Editing
paper tapes was difficult enough that Dan Murphy came up with TECO - original
name 'Tape Editor and Corrector':

  https://opost.com/tenex/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf

    > Will had asked -- how did people learn to use reg-ex?

I learned it from reading the 'sh' and 'ed' V6 man pages.

The MIT V6 systems had TECO (with a ^R mode even), but I started out with ed,
since it was more like editors I had previously used.

	Noel

[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Will Senn]

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On 3/5/24 10:34 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> Will had asked -- how did people learn to use reg-ex?  The observation 
> I had made and was bringing forward to the list is that if new user 
> came from a background based on being taught about how to create a 
> pattern match er, and sid person had learned a little about the ideas 
> behind automatons, learn to use reg-ex was not a big deal.  It was 
> only 'astonishing,' and users might need a separate explanation if 
> they started from some other place - particularly if they did not have 
> that same background in core CS theory/they had previously learned a 
> different way with a different set of tools, such as the text editor.
>
> As I understand it, this is how Will came to learn UNIX, so folks like 
> Will needed and appreciated documentation that came from other places. 
> I think that he was asking which documents and what people in the 
> background similar to him had chosen to use to learn how to use the 
> UNIX toolkit.
>
>
> Clem
>
Yup. I was curious about exactly that and the answers fit the bill 
nicely. I knew that Ritchie & co. were mathy cs types, but it didn't 
occur to me that the rest of the unix folks were, as well. A little 
reflection and it became somewhat obvious. Sure, there were plenty of 
exceptions, but then, they had mathy cs types to lean on. Coming at it 
from the new millennium, it's hard to grok the early days, or recreate 
the aha moments. I'm just using Unix explorations as motivations for 
deeper study of CS stuff that interest me, personally. When I picked up 
the AWK book the other day, regex popped out at me as a deficiency 
(sure, I use them all the time, but mastery... not even close... a lot 
of the time, it's like magic...) so, rather than just start coding up a 
bunch of regexes, I thought I would find out a bit more about their 
genesis - not the research that led to their discovery or perfection (I 
have no mathy interest), but rather how they came into common use (the 
pragmatics, as it were). This led to me asking about the gestalt of the 
60's / 70's and suchlike. For me, this is a bit like virtual reality, 
where I can immerse myself in what it might have been like and how it 
might have unfolded while tooling around like it is 1969 all over again. 
Thankfully, for a lot of y'all it's lived history and by willingly 
sharing so freely, you enrich the real-feel of the simulation :).

Later,

Will




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[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Clem Cole]

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below...

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 1:49 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

> Thank you.  Some additional clues: the jargon file started at SAIL, and shortly
> after was adopted by MIT and then jointly maintained.  So it's
> not clear which one is "the PDP-6" here.  As far as I know, Bill Weiher, the
> creator of STOPGAP and/or SOS?, is associated with SAIL, not MIT.
>
You are welcome. I'm sorry to confuse the origin and the historical
correction. I was using the docs I had, and as you pointed out, the Jargon
says PDP-6 but does not specify which site. My notes from the later PDP-10
pointed at DEC+MIT. It does sound like STOPGAP/SOS came to the DEC world
from Stanford. So thank you.

That said, bring it back to the original question from Will.   My original
email was about the history of using reg-ex WRT to UNIX. It was less about
editors and who did what as much as trying to point out that the idea of a
text editor existed long before Ken's version of QED, much less, ed(1).    Most
importantly, Ken's QED came after the original QED, which came after other
text editors. Adding reg-ex to an editor was natural for someone schooled
in the ideas behind automaton and pattern matching. But tmany/most of the
text editors in used had been created before that work had begun to be
studied and formalized, so, these other editors had not included using
reg-ex for the pattern match/search scheme.

Ken's great leap was modeling and combining the QED user interface with
this new idea in text pattern match/searching, demonstrating that it was a
good fit. That would lead to other tools that decided to include the same
pattern-matching ideas (grep, sed, awk, Perl, *et al.*).

Will had asked -- how did people learn to use reg-ex?  The observation I
had made and was bringing forward to the list is that if new user came from
a background based on being taught about how to create a pattern match er,
and sid person had learned a little about the ideas behind automatons,
learn to use reg-ex was not a big deal.  It was only 'astonishing,' and
users might need a separate explanation if they started from some other
place - particularly if they did not have that same background in core CS
theory/they had previously learned a different way with a different set of
tools, such as the text editor.

As I understand it, this is how Will came to learn UNIX, so folks like Will
needed and appreciated documentation that came from other places. I think
that he was asking which documents and what people in the background
similar to him had chosen to use to learn how to use the UNIX toolkit.


Clem

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[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Clem Cole wrote:
> Jargon file says: SOS n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text
> editor.  Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for
> the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap
> editor' to be used until a better one was written.

Thank you.  Some additional clues: the jargon file started at SAIL, and
shortly after was adopted by MIT and then jointly maintained.  So it's
not clear which one is "the PDP-6" here.  As far as I know, Bill Weiher,
the creator of STOPGAP and/or SOS?, is associated with SAIL, not MIT.

[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 4, 2024 at 3:27 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

>
>
> I'd like expand on this, since I never heard about STOPGAP or SOS on the MIT
> PDP-6/10 computers.

Hmm, you are undoubtedly right.  STOPGAP and SOS might just have been at
DECisms.

I initially used SOS on the CMU PDP-10s to prep BLISS, Macro-10, and SAIL
for a small job I got.  It was the most like the editor used on
other job on the Computere Center's TSS system (whose name I forget, which
I learned first).  I wanted to get stuff done, not learn a new editor, so
that was fine.  It also worked on VMS 1.0, IIRC, as I had a job moving some
BLISS-10 code to BLISS32 on the first Vax.  At some point, I was shown TECO
and EMACS on the PDP-10s, but I had started to work on PDP-11 UNIX by then,
and ed(1) was all that was on V5. At the time, learning something fancier
for the PDP-10 seemed like a wrong time investment since I was not getting
paid to work on that system, and I was getting paid to hack on UNIX.

Truth be known, as a UNIX person, I got pretty adept with ed, so even when
vi mode of ex showed up a few years later, I was actually slow to bother.

Any the CMU SOS doc I have says STOPGAP was DEC/MIT-ism but I bet that's
wrong -- it was probably just DEC.

Jargon file says: *SOS n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text
editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the
PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be
used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never
really discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a
descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained
the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar
in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS
/bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard
Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease;
inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set.*




> TECO was ported over to the 6 only a few weeks after delivers, and that
> seems to have been the major editor ever since.
> Did you think of the SAIL PDP-6?
>
Maybe. I don't know.
ᐧ
ᐧ

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[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: regex early discussions

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Dropped TUHS; added COFF.

> * Numerous editors show up on different systems, including STOPGAP on
> the MIT PDP6, eventually SOS, TECO, EMACs, etc., and most have some
> concept of a 'line of text' to distinguish from a 'card image.'

I'd like expand on this, since I never heard about STOPGAP or SOS on the
MIT PDP-6/10 computers.  TECO was ported over to the 6 only a few weeks
after delivers, and that seems to have been the major editor ever since.
Did you think of the SAIL PDP-6?