[OS X TeX] TeXShop 4.53

[koch at uoregon.edu]

> On Dec 7, 2020, at 12:00 PM, Ettore Aldrovandi <ealdrov at mail.math.fsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> If you can dig out the “UNIX Power tools” by Tim O’Reilly from some dark corner of eBay (I don’t know if it’s still available), that was a wonderful reference on anything Unix related, including regular expressions. But I don’t know “modern” references.  In a terminal, running
> 
> 	man re_format
> 
> will give you the man page, which does have all the information. I can’t say it’s super-illuminating, but it will give you all you need to know. The main drawback is that, unlike other man pages, it does not have examples.
> 
> —Ettore


One of my students works in Portland as a Macintosh programmer. He recently recommended

	UNIX, A History and a Memoir

by Brian Kernighan, 2020, Kindle Direct Publishing.

Kernighan discusses regular expressions in a story that begins as follows:

``One day in 1972 I was called by someone at the Labs who said 'I noticed that when I hold my new
pocket calculator upside down, some of the numbers make letters; for example, 3 becomes E and
7 becomes L. I know you guys have a dictionary on your computer. It there any way
you can tell me what words I can make on my calculator when I hold it upside down?'

Kernighan then writes "Being in a research group, it felt good to help someone who had
a really practical problem."

He then prints the list of 263 words that grep and a regular expression produced. 

Dick Koch