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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Now you've got me curious which came first, "paste" or "zip".

Python's zip function was added in PEP 201 [1], which credits the Haskell 98 report with the name. The same function appears in all prior versions of the Haskell language that I could find, dating back to Haskell 1.0 in 1990.

On the other hand, the GNU coreutils version of paste[2] has copyright dates going all the way back to 1984, which presumably means it was derived from UNIX System V or an even earlier version.

[1]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0201/

[2]: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/paste...

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The FreeBSD man page for `paste` claims it first appeared in Unix 32V (1979; derived from v7 Unix, and ancestral to both 4BSD and SysV).

Here's the commit from 1978: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Bell-32...

The comments refer to an "old 127 paste command" but I have no idea what that is.

I hadn't pursued it further than seeing that it was added in an 1978 commit.

Looking at it further, there are a few answers at https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2020-January/019955.h...

> GWRL stands for Gottfried W. R. Luderer, the author of cut(1) and paste(1), probably around 1978. Those came either from PWB or USG

I can verify that neither cut nor past were in PWB 1: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1

> Also "127" was the internal department number for the Computer Science Research group at Bell Labs where UNIX originated

The miranda language (which predates haskell) had a zip function. According to wikipedia, miranda was released in 1985, but I dont know if zip was in the standard miranda environment back then. The comments in the source code say:

    The following is included for compatibility with Bird and Wadler (1988).
    The normal Miranda style is to use the curried form `zip2'.

    > zip :: ([*],[**])->[(*,**)]
    > zip (x,y) = zip2 x y

which suggests a slightly later origination of zip.

It's possible a lisp of some sort predated the Haskell version

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