Doug,

No matter. I have often thought about what an amazing muse you were to so many people regarding so many different ideas that have panned out. It seems to me that you were always there at the right time. Your powers to get the best from everyone around you are unlike anyone else I have ever been lucky enough to have met. Although I have also often said to students the one really hard thing to directly teach, that you can learn by looking at people that came before you is 'good taste.' We all owe you as much thanks for being there and inspiring your peers, as for their brilliance in implementing the concepts with style and taste.

Clem

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022 at 11:49 AM Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

Brian's tribute to the brilliant regex mechanism that awk borrowed
from egrep spurred memories.

For more than forty years I claimed credit for stimulating Ken to
liberate grep from ed. Then, thanks to TUHS, I learned that I had
merely caused Ken to spring from the closet a program he had already
made for his own use.

There's a related story for egrep. Al Aho made a deterministic
regular-expression recognizer as a faster replacement for the
non-deterministic recognizer in grep. He also extended the domain of
patterns to full regular expressions, including alternation; thus the
"e" in egrep.

About the same time, I built on Norm Shryer's personal calendar
utility. I wanted to generalize Norm's strict syntax for dates to
cover most any (American) representation of dates, and to warn about
tomorrow's calendar as well as today's--where "tomorrow" could extend
across a weekend or holiday.

Egrep was just the tool I needed for picking the dates out of a
free-form calendar file. I wrote a little program that built an egrep
pattern based on today's date. The following mouthful for Saturday,
August 20 covers Sunday and Monday, too. (Note that, in egrep, newline
is a synonym for |, the alternation operator.)

(^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*20)([^0123456789]|$)
(^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*21)([^0123456789]|$)
(^|[ (,;])(([Aa]ug[^ ]* *|(08|8)/)0*22)([^0123456789]|$)

It worked like a charm, except that it took a good part of a minute to
handle even a tiny calendar file. The reason: the state count of the
deterministic automaton was exponentially larger than the regular
regular expression; and egrep had to build the automaton before it
could run it. Al was mortified that an early serious use of egrep
should be such a turkey.

But Al was undaunted. He replaced the automaton construction with an
equivalent lazy algorithm that constructed a state only when the
recognizer was about to visit it. This made egrep into the brilliant
tool that Brian praised.

What I don't know is whether the calendar program stimulated the idea
of lazy implementation, or whether Al, like Ken before him with grep,
already had the idea up his sleeve.

Doug