Since Steve has mentioned it, this and much more about regular expressions
and their implementations may found at 

	https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/

Highly recommended.

Arnold

"Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> If you haven't seen it, check out Ken Thompson's brilliant paper on
> compiling regular expressions.  The date was 1968... In effect, he
> built a JIT to do regular expression searches (on an IBM 7094, no
> less!).
>
> https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjika38mP3UAhVT2WMKHd3FAEcQFggoMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fing.edu.uy%2Finco%2Fcursos%2Fintropln%2Fmaterial%2Fp419-thompson.pdf&usg=AFQjCNFTSoOmBGBOl-DdCqUAv5dLLuuQPg
>
> The earliest reference is a paper by Kleene in 1956.   In fact, I
> recall that * was sometimes called "the Kleene star" in the day...
>
> Steve
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Winalski" <paul.winalski at gmail.com>
> To:"ron minnich" <rminnich at gmail.com>
> Cc:"The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Sent:Sun, 9 Jul 2017 17:55:50 -0400
> Subject:[TUHS] Regular Expressions (was Re: origin of the name 'glob')
>
>  On 7/9/17, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >>
>  > All the DEC-10 and 11 operating systems I used had that wildcard,
> as well
>  > as IIRC even the PDP-8, maybe someone can confirm the -8.
>  >
>  > It would have been nice had RE's been the standard way to glob
> files, but,
>  > that said, when I mention .*.c to people instead of *.c they don't
> much
>  > like it.
>
>  So when were REs first designed and implemented? I would imagine that
>  they came about as a way to extend the old '*' and '?' wildcard
>  syntax, but that is only a guess.
>
>  -Paul W.
>