http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1023410


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?