GNU-Friends: Interview with Karl Berry

During your time with the FSF, you also helped
out to get Autoconf to successfully configure TeX, which I’m sure
was no small task, and you also did some work on Ghostscript.
What’s your strongest memory from working with the FSF?

Although those projects were fun and valuable, my strongest
technical memory is actually working on regex.c. POSIX was
standardizing regular expressions at the time, and we implemented
about 10 different drafts as the committee came out with new ones,
while keeping compatibility with Emacs and all the other programs
that used it. It was a nightmare. We ended up with regex.c having
as many lines of debugging statements as actual code, just so we
could understand what it was doing.

I’ve since looked at a bunch of other regex packages and it
seems basically impossible to implement the regular expressions
we’ve grown used to in any reasonable way.

My strongest nontechnical memory is rms’s vision of free
software and how clearly he communicated it and how strongly he
held (and holds) to it. It was and is an inspiration to me.”

Complete
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