I wrote: > While this is sufficient to make the problem go away, I'm > inclined to apply both changesets. Even if it accidentally > works right now to have later backrefs consult the outer s/s2 > state pair rather than the original pair, that seems far too > convoluted and bug-prone. The outer states should be strictly > the concern of the iteration setup logic in the outer invocation > of parseqatom.
> (I'm sort of wondering now whether the outer s/s2 states are > even really necessary anymore ... maybe Spencer put those in > as a way of preventing some prehistoric version of this bug. > But I'm not excited about messing with that right now.) I realized that the earlier patch is actually a bad idea, because it breaks the possibility of updating the subre to mark it as being referenced by a later backref, as the REG_NOSUB patch needs to do. However, on closer study, the outer s/s2 states being added by the "prepare a general-purpose state skeleton" stanza really are duplicative of the ones we already made for a parenthesized atom, so we can just get rid of them. Done that way. regards, tom lane