Guido van Rossum writes:
Possibly contradicting what I once said about DFAs (I have no idea what I said any more :-): I think we shouldn't be hung up about the subtleties of DFA vs. NFA; for most people, the Perl-compatibility simply means that they can use the same metacharacters. My guess is
I don't like slipping in such a change to the semantics with no visible change to the module name or interface. On the other hand, if it's not NFA-based, then it can provide POSIX semantics without danger of taking exponential time to determine the longest match. BTW, there's an interesting reference, I assume to this code, in _Mastering Regular Expressions_; Spencer is quoted on page 121 as saying it's "at worst quadratic in text size.". Anyway, we can let it slide until a Python interface gets written. -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/ In the black shadow of the Baba Yaga babies screamed and mothers miscarried; milk soured and men went mad. -- In SANDMAN #38: "The Hunt"