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posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 27 2024, @08:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-didn't-know-that-... dept.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-regexes-use-and-as-line-anchors/

Last week I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole: why do regular expressions use $ and ^ as line anchors?1

This talk brings up that they first appeared in Ken Thompson's port of the QED text editor. In his manual he writes: b) "^" is a regular expression which matches character at the beginning of a line.

c) "$" is a regular expression which matches character before the character (usually at the end of a line)

QED was the precursor to ed, which was instrumental in popularizing regexes, so a lot of its design choices stuck.

Okay, but then why did Ken Thompson choose those characters?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:24PM (5 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:24PM (#1350667) Journal

    CSS is great, but should even that be necessary? Reflowing of text to fit window sizes is a core feature of plain old HTML. No more reliance on CR/LF for that. If a user is forced to scroll back and forth to view the full width, despite the site not using any JavaScript or set widths or whatever, that seems to me a problem with their environment, not the site. Note also that the browser has the final say over fonts. A site can give relative size differences; the user's system ultimately sets what size "big", "normal" and "small" are.

    A common idea is a mobile version of the site. m.soylentnews.org

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:50PM

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 28 2024, @12:50PM (#1350671) Journal
    m.soylentnews.org doesn't seem to work for the moment.
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    I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
  • (Score: 2) by owl on Thursday March 28 2024, @07:29PM (1 child)

    by owl (15206) on Thursday March 28 2024, @07:29PM (#1350745)

    CSS is great, but should even that be necessary? Reflowing of text to fit window sizes is a core feature of plain old HTML. No more reliance on CR/LF for that.

    Because by far too many designers feel some hugely irrational need to control the layout to a level far more strict than "let html lay out the data based upon the viewport width".

    Note that most of these designers are those from the "publishing" environment where positioning text in this corner of a page, and a highlight image over in this other spot, in order to leave room in three other places for three ad slots, was what they were trained to do.

    I.e., they never even consider just letting the HTML lay itself out natively. They need to control where it goes, to the pixel, or they feel they have failed.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday March 28 2024, @09:21PM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Thursday March 28 2024, @09:21PM (#1350758)

      Designers are probably trained for traditional print media, and something that describes layouts and floats using declarative and markup languages is probably going to require a GUI for them to be able to do their thing. They're not coders, after all.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday March 29 2024, @07:39AM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 29 2024, @07:39AM (#1350819) Journal

    A common idea is a mobile version of the site. m.soylentnews.org

    That's the absolute worst thing to do. If I follow a link, it should work equally well if I follow it on a desktop or on a laptop.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 29 2024, @07:41AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 29 2024, @07:41AM (#1350820) Journal

      Err, mistyped, and only noticed after submit: I of course meant desktop or phone.

      And in addition I now have to wait with posting this correction due to the unreasonable long wait time enforced by the Rehash software.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.