Interesting question. A quick trip to
FOLDOC revealed the following:
The earliest form of regular expressions (and the term itself) were invented by mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene in the mid-1950s, as a notation to easily manipulate "regular sets", formal descriptions of the behaviour of finite state machines, in regular algebra. [/QUOTE ]
the full definition
[ April 14, 2004: Message edited by: Ray Stojonic ]