The early origins of Microsoft |
The "ancestors" of regular expressions can be traced back to early studies of how the human nervous system works. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, two neuroscientists, have developed a mathematical way of describing these neural networks.
In 1956, an American mathematician named Stephen Kleene, based on the early work of McCulloch and Pitts, published a paper entitled "Representation of neural network events", introducing the concept of regular expressions. A regular expression is an expression that describes what he calls the algebra of a regular set, so the term "regular expression" is used.
Subsequently, it was found that this work could be applied to some early studies using Ken Thompson's computational Search algorithm, and Ken Thompson was the main inventor of Unix. The first practical application of regular expressions is the QED editor in Unix.
As they say, the rest is a well-known history. From then until now regular expressions are an important part of text-based editors and search tools.
