Does a '_sre.SRE_Pattern' have state,or is it thread-safe?

[Stephen Hansen]

On Jun 23, 2010, at 9:10 AM, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:

>   '_sre.SRE_Pattern' is what "re.compile" returns.
>
>   Is that a mutable object, with state that changes
> during the parse, or is it an immutable constant?  Can
> two threads use the same '_sre.SRE_Pattern' at the same time?

Ouch. I hope it is thread safe or I have some problems. But: since
compiled regular expressions are automatically cached and used when
one throws non compiled expressions into re, ISTM they have to be
thread safe. Or we'd have tons of problems.

--Stephen via iPad.