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I know you're not trying to say that regular expressions were created as part of Perl, but I think you're giving a bit too much credit to it[1] regarding regexes. The PCRE library is indeed used all over. And Perl was, I think, the first first-class scripting language that integrated regexes so closely to control structures and other language features in a way that feels truly natural. There are still a lot of tools out there that use other regex libraries. Don't have it in front of me, but there's a lovely chart in the book _Mastering Regular Expressions_[2] that breaks out regular expression library use by tool. But, generally, I think the diversity of regex libraries actually causes problems for adoption these days, because people who are tempted to use them (thus learn more) tend to run in to other tools where the things they've learns mysteriously don't work anymore, and scares them off. Anyway, regular expressions in the wild go back to Unix v.4, which included Ken Thompson's grep. [1] Perl deserves a ton of credit it doesn't get in general, including credit for giving the world PCREs. [2] In general, if you work with regexes a lot and don't own this book, you're doing yourself a disservice. It is one of my top-10 technical books, not just for density of actionable information, but also for the pure general excellence. |