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in reply to Re^2: Interesting behavior of regular expression engine
in thread Interesting behavior of regular expression engine

What's not well-defined is what steps the underlying implementation takes to arrive at the output,

Yet, "Programming Perl 3rd" lays out 6 very complicated rules describing in detail how the regex engine proceeds (p 197-201). So, Larry at least thinks the steps are/were well defined. I wonder if those steps are in the new edition?
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Re^4: Interesting behavior of regular expression engine
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 14, 2013 at 08:00 UTC

    So, Larry at least thinks the steps are well defined.

    I don't know what you're talking about, but that book is 12 years old at least, and larry himself hasn't touched the regex engine in about as long , optimizations have been added, things have changed

      Ok, I've read the rules in 5.9.4. The Little Engine That /Could(n't)?/ and they are prefaced with for this discussion we're pretending the optimizer doesn't exist. , pretty much what we've been saying