Re: Perl 5's "non-greedy" matching can be TOO greedy!

[Jarkko Hietaniemi]

> More generally, it seems to me that you're hung up on the description 
> of "*?" as "shortest possible match".  That's an ambiguous 

Yup, that's a bit confusing.  It's really "start matching as soon as
possible, and stop matching as soon as possible".  (The usual greedy
one is, of course, "keep matching as long as possible".)  The initial
invariant part, "start as soon as possible", is the de facto and de
jure (at least POSIX 1003.2, but probably also Single Unix)
definition, and therefore rather non-negotiable.

> simplification of what "*?" means.  It might better be described as 
> "match until you find a match for the rest of the regex" ('d' in your 

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