Regular Expression System tutorial (2)

2. Regular Expression history

The "Ancestor" of regular expressions can be traced back to early studies on how the human nervous system works. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, two neuroscientists, developed a mathematical method to describe these neural networks.

In 1956, a mathematician named Stephen Kleene published a paper titled "neural network event representation" based on McCulloch and Pitts's early work, introduces the concept of regular expressions. A regular expression is an expression used to describe the algebra of a positive set. Therefore, the regular expression is used.

Later, it was found that this work could be applied to some early research using Ken Thompson's computational search algorithm, which is the main inventor of Unix. The first utility of regular expressions is the qed editor in Unix.

As they said, the rest is the well-known history. Since then, regular expressions have been an important part of text-based editors and search tools.