> 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,
>

I wonder if that was the inspiration for the Qaddafi torture test; see
http://sources.vsta.org/comp.sources.unix/volume9/fastgrep/part01 (June 87)

The first time I saw "p[-1]" was looking at some regexp source.  It
blew/expanded my mind.