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A comment on Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expressions?. Parent comment

Re:Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expres... by yen223 on Thursday August 16, 2012 @04:37AM (#4390441)
"Easy to write, hard to read". Perl's influence on Regex shows. Which is fine in most cases.

I always wonder what regexes would look like if they were derived from Python instead.

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Re:Is it a must for every programmer to learn regular expres... by arnsholt on Thursday August 16, 2012 @04:46AM (#4390468)
Actually, regex syntax isn't primarily a Perl invention. Regexes as software tools go back to early Unix text processing tools (ed and grep, according to Wikipedia), and Perl took the syntax from those tools.

It is true that Perl reformed the syntax in important ways (to the better, if you ask me), and later on extended it a lot, but it's certainly not a Perl invention.

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