[Python-ideas] Regular expression algorithms

[Adam Atlas]

Has anyone seen this article?
http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

Are its criticisms of Python's regex algorithm accurate? If so, might  
it be possible to revise Python's `re` module to use this sort of  
algorithm? I noticed it says that this approach doesn't work if the  
pattern contains backreferences, but maybe the module could at least  
sort of self-optimize by switching to this method when no backrefs  
are used.