Question How did REGEX jaibreak from Compiler Technology and

Question

Question How did REGEX jaibreak from Compiler Technology and become popular with non compilerists First guess 1 grep sed awk etc broke the ice and 2 perl brought REGEX into the mainstream I guess that perl solved a latent problem which made it very popular What was that problem

Orion Reed · Answer

I think part of the answer is that is that it s representation as strings meant that it was supported by a near ubiquitous infrastructure of plaintext which made it much easier to share store and use in everyday systems

Justin Blank · Answer

The real question for me is why isn t grep regex search more commonly used by non programmers

Duncan Cragg · Answer

It s funny how all declarative syntaxes syntaxii acquire a reputation for fiendishness Take CSS coulda been a non programmer language but it s notoriously hard to do simple things like line stuff up take SQL a team at my work had the SQL expert who everyone went to cos it was so bloody hard and of course the most notorious of all regexes if only there were a non brain twisting way of doing them

Jack Rusher · Answer

There are better ways of writing them that date back to the 1960s This rant from Sussman captures the problems and the implementation that follows shows one way of improving matters <https github com bzinberg regex combinator blob c49d6aba03d2a42c33b1bdafc7d5e5ded9d60eb8 ps txt L33>

Justin Blank · Answer

One part of that seems a bit off The nice formalism is for regular expressions which don t support backreferences one of the ways that modern regexes drifted from the original concept towards more power but more obscurity

Justin Blank · Answer

Combinators are neat and I wish they were better integrated as an option that plays nicely with existing libraries The downside is that they give up the very powerful idea of regular expressions as a language instead of just another API for doing string processing

Justin Blank · Answer

As a result they re most powerful for programmers who rarely use regular expressions and programmers who want to do certain more abstract manipulations of regular expressions but weak for non programmer end users and programmers who routinely use regular expressions

Andrew F · Answer

Parsing is an essential part of any IO more complicated than accepting and echoing byte strings Regex solves or helps solve parsing across a wide variety of problems I think that answers why it jailbroke from compilerists it was never just a compiler thing everyone needs parsing Once someone figured out the math something like regex was inevitable The question of Perl s adoption and by extension PCRE is IMO a separate one more historical than theoretical I assume it s the usual right place right time path dependent worse is better type of story Certainly Perl is more than PCRE and was responsive to more problems than just parsing