Brief intro before I go into lurk mode

[Peter A. Friend]

I thought I should introduce myself before I start poring through
the archives.

I started programming in BASIC when I was about ten (viva TRS-80!),
long before I could really understand what was going on. Computers
remained an occasional hobby until about 5 years ago. At that time, I
started getting back into it by doing some database work for my
clueless employer. I built a computer, then started fiddling with
Delphi and assembly. When I started working for EarthLink in 1995 (I
needed a part time job so I could finish school quicker), I was
introduced to Unix. 

That did it. I changed my major to CS, and went back to working full
time. Given that I learn more at work and reading on my own in 3 months
than 1 year of school, I only take one class per quarter. Because of
this, there are certain theoretical areas that you deal with here that
I am a bit rusty on.

When it comes to code, I am a speed freak, so my favorite languages are
C and assembly. I tend to dislike languages like C++ because of speed
concerns, though I think a lot of those concerns could be sated by a
good optimizing compiler. I do work daily with shell scripts, Perl and
Java as well.

My personal coding interests include parsers and pattern matching. My
"Holy Grail" project is an implementation of a regular expression
matcher by Bruce Watson which uses Boyer-Moore style shifting.

Off to the archives...

Peter

pafriend@octavian.org
http://www.octavian.org

---
Software Engineer
EarthLink Network