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

[Tom Christiansen]

>We may have to "agree to disagree".  

I shan't be doing that.

>I'm understand why people believe in
>the current semantics, but I've seen no indication that anyone else
>understands why I believe in these alternative semantics, or has tried.
>(Disagreeing with my conclusion doesn't preclude understanding where I'm
>coming from, but nobody seems to.)

You have not addressed the heat death of the universe as I and
others have illustrated.  Finding all possible matches is very often
completely infeasible.  Please solve the electron decay problem
before continuing.

>Well, obviously we could.  Maybe we shouldn't, but we could do it.  Many,
>many existing programs depended on Perl 4's magic behavior with @'s in
>double-quoted strings, yet Perl 5 broke them all with a fatal error during
>the compile phase.  People survived.  They adapted and moved on.  

Red herring.

>Unlike
>that incompatibility, this one would probably affect few programs.

You're wrong.  Incredibly wrong.  

--tom