Regular Expression - History

History

The origins of regular expressions lie in automata theory and formal language theory, both of which are part of theoretical computer science. These fields study models of computation (automata) and ways to describe and classify formal languages. In the 1950s, mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene described these models using his mathematical notation called regular sets. The SNOBOL language was an early implementation of pattern matching, but not identical to regular expressions. Ken Thompson built Kleene's notation into the editor QED as a means to match patterns in text files. He later added this capability to the Unix editor ed, which eventually led to the popular search tool grep's use of regular expressions ("grep" is a word derived from the command for regular expression searching in the ed editor: g/re/p where re stands for regular expression). Since that time, many variations of Thompson's original adaptation of regular expressions have been widely used in Unix and Unix-like utilities including expr, AWK, Emacs, vi, and lex.

Perl and Tcl regular expressions were derived from a regex library written by Henry Spencer, though Perl later expanded on Spencer's library to add many new features. Philip Hazel developed PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), which attempts to closely mimic Perl's regular expression functionality and is used by many modern tools including PHP and Apache HTTP Server. Part of the effort in the design of Perl 6 is to improve Perl's regular expression integration, and to increase their scope and capabilities to allow the definition of parsing expression grammars. The result is a mini-language called Perl 6 rules, which are used to define Perl 6 grammar as well as provide a tool to programmers in the language. These rules maintain existing features of Perl 5.x regular expressions, but also allow BNF-style definition of a recursive descent parser via sub-rules.

The use of regular expressions in structured information standards for document and database modeling started in the 1960s and expanded in the 1980s when industry standards like ISO SGML (precursored by ANSI "GCA 101-1983") consolidated. The kernel of the structure specification language standards consists of regular expressions. Its use is evident in the DTD element group syntax.