alt Hacker NewsAre you sure it was Thompson who added backtracking to grep? Note also that the POSIX standard intentionally omits backtracking regex. It is a shame that others have not deprecated them.
Are you sure it was Thompson who added backtracking to grep? Note also that the POSIX standard intentionally omits backtracking regex. It is a shame that others have not deprecated them.
We're talking about backtracking and not back references, right? The original implementations of Ed and Grep in Unix did backtracking, not back references.