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Postings from December 2000
>I meant that I've never seen >a concrete, realistic example where the current behavior is more beneficial >to the programmer than my proposed behavior. Absense of evidence is hardly evidence of absence. `cat /vmunix` =~ /\w+/ I just love guaranteed worst-case behavior. NOT. It is good to short circuit. Very good. >(I imagine in most cases, it >will be a moot point, since the match will usually be the same.) Then why the bloody blazes are you arguing about this so vociferously? >Strange argument. Greedy matching was once considered fundamental to the >design of regex, and the "leftmost" behavior is 100% consistent with greedy >matching. Nope. These are orthogonal, unrelated concpets. >Yet Perl 5 added non-greedy modifiers, changing a fundamental >aspect of every preceding regex system, and still called it a regex... Whether a match should be minimal or maximal in no way changes whether the language is to be deemed "regular" by the proper definition of that term. Back-references, which have been in Perl since its inception, suffice to disqualify the language from that category, but minimal and maximal alternation do not. But this doesn't matter. --tom