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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) "$" is a regular expression which matches character before the character (usually at the end of a line)
QED was the precursor to ed, which was instrumental in popularizing regexes, so a lot of its design choices stuck.
Okay, but then why did Ken Thompson choose those characters?
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Why Do Regexes Use `$` and `^` as Line Anchors?
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Whenever someone tells you to take their advice, you can be pretty sure
that they're not using it.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday March 28 2024, @09:27PM (1 child)
And the qwerty keyboard layout is designed to keep the hammers from jamming [dvzine.org].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday March 29 2024, @02:14PM
Yes, and unfortunately one of those two things can be easily remedied as needed. It's one of the reasons why it's worth having a good monitor stand, it should allow you to rotate the screen 90 degrees if you're doing something that benefits from that. Or, just have the window manager tile the window to only take up half of the width.
The keyboard though is a much more annoying problem. Yes, you an use whatever map you like, so long as you have enough keys, but it's a whole thing to learn a new layout and if you're a decent typist it may not even be worth the effort.