A thought occurred to me a few days ago: If I remember correctly, attempts to benchmark parrot's developing regular expressions against perl's regular expressions are proving "disappointing". However, perl5 has the advantage of a regular expression optimiser as I understand it, or at least code to work out the optimal place to start a match, and interesting strategies to discard things that never match.
How hard is it to "knobble" a perl5 to disable the regular expression optimiser? Surely that would level the playing field, so that parrot's regexp engine speed would be directly comparable with perl's regexp engine speed? And then later perl5 be allowed its optimiser back once parrot has one. Nicholas Clark -- ENOCHOCOLATE http://www.ccl4.org/~nick/CV.html
