>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
