Asterisk
cormullion.github.io
Asterisk
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Asterisk
#2This is about the glyph, not the telephony software. Though it does go into some of the modern technology involved.
Re: Asterisk
#3"Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from."
"." is the wildcard character. "*" is a quantifier meaning 0 or more of the previous.
Re: Asterisk
#4"Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from." "." is the wildcard character. "*" is a quantifier meaning 0 or more of the previous.
in regex this is correct, but in many other contexts * is used as wildcard.
ie.: in most OSes you can use * as wildcard for filename.
file.*
will refer to all files named "file" with any extension
.zip
will refer to all files with any name as long as they have the zip extension
is a wildcard in most contexts while "." is wildcard only in regex that i know.
Re: Asterisk
#5This is one of those posts I save to read later but never actually read. It's interesting but not essential.
Re: Asterisk
#6"Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from." "." is the wildcard character. "*" is a quantifier meaning 0 or more of the previous.
in regex this is correct, but in many other contexts * is used as wildcard. ie.: in most OSes you can use * as wildcard for filename. file.* will refer to all files named "file" with any extension .zip will refer to all files with any name as long as they have the zip extension is a wildcard in most contexts while "." is wildcard only in regex that i know.
True. But in the article, the full paragraph reads like this:
Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from. I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally.
Re: Asterisk
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
in regex this is correct, but in many other contexts * is used as wildcard. ie.: in most OSes you can use * as wildcard for filename. file.* will refer to all files named "file" with any extension .zip will refer to all files with any name as long as they have the zip extension is a wildcard in most contexts while "." is wildcard only in regex that i know.
True. But in the article, the full paragraph reads like this: Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from. I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally.
* is the wildcard in some forms of regular expressions, such as file name globs.
Re: Asterisk
#8Coming from Russian books I was extremely confused by the varied asterisks used for footnotes in English/American literature. Why would you go to all the trouble with 15 different types of asterisks when you can just use numbers?
Re: Asterisk
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But in the article, the full paragraph reads like this: Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from. I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally.
* is the wildcard in some forms of regular expressions, such as file name globs.
I know that * is the wildcard in many expressions, such as some query languages and (as you say) file name globs. However, I don't actually think a wildcard glob is a regular expression. Wikipedia, always a risky source :-), makes that point, with a reference to further reading.
The article is about the asterisk character, and the connection to the wild-card seems legit. But the sentence "I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally" (which I agree fully with!) hints towards the idea that the * is used as a wildcard in regular expressions, which I think isn't quite true.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)#Compared_to...
Re: Asterisk
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But in the article, the full paragraph reads like this: Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from. I find regular expressions can induce swearing, occasionally.
* is the wildcard in some forms of regular expressions, such as file name globs.
A glob isn't a regular expression, and indeed one of the reasons it isn't is that it lacks the Kleene star - which is the thing an asterisk does in the typical regular expression syntax.