From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 12:48:19 +1100 (EST) Subject: [TUHS] Short history of 'grep' In-Reply-To: <201601311701.u0VH12It027916@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201601311701.u0VH12It027916@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: On Sun, 31 Jan 2016, Doug McIlroy wrote: [...] > That's the short story. In real life egrep overcomes the exponential by > lazily constructing the machine--not generating a state until it is > encountered in the parse, so no more than n states get constructed. It's > a complex program, though, for the already fancy preprocessing must be > interleaved with the parsing. Many thanks; I think I understand a little better now... It's been many years since I majored in Computer Science :-) -- Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."