On Sat, 1 Aug 2020 at 02:38, Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:

>
> during the mid 80s, i was preparing one of the first invited talks for
> USENIX on the subject of regular expressions.
> i had concocted a massive RE that matched all the known spellings of
> saddam hussein. (it was complicated,
> and there were many different romanizations active at the time.)
>
> dennis ritchie wandered into the unix room and asked what it was and then
> immediately applied it to our
> somewhat newish AP news wire feed. it matched two new spellings!!
>

I recalled that one being about Khadaffi, of Libya, and there being a
punchline involving one of the names being
"squid-breath."
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"