Re^3: Can we make $& better? (need)

[bart]

You still could allow changing the string to match against, and be able to read the contents of $1 and friends later, if a copy-on-write system was implemented. That way these match strings would only get copied in case your original string changes underneath.

I'd prefer it if Perl was smart enough to skip the copy in case you don't need it, but I doubt it could be made so smart without a little manual help from a flag.