The first entry on this list is McCulloch-Pitts nerve nets whose expressive power were analysed by S.C. Kleene [1]. In his article he coined the term "regular e

The first entry on this list is McCulloch-Pitts nerve nets whose expressive power were analysed by S.C. Kleene [1]. In his article he coined the term "regular events" for the class of languages that could be expressed by nerve nets/finite automata, and this is where regular expressions got their name from. If you have ever thought the name was strange, rest assured that Kleene didn't actually like it either, he just couldn't think of something better at the time: > We shall presently describe a class of events which we will call "regular events" (We would welcome any suggestions as to a more descriptive term.*) > [...] > * McCulloch and Pitts use the term "prehensible," introduced rather differently; but since we did not understand their definition, we did not adopt the term. So, had McCulloch and Pitts been a bit clearer in their seminal paper, then maybe it would have been called "prehensible expressions" :). [1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2008/RM704.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...