> To my mind, this is a bug in the RE engine. Is there any reason to not > treat it as a bug?
It's not a bug, it's a feature! ;-) Indeed, in order to handle constructs like (?P=name), RE engines have to use inefficient algorithms. In my opinion, this is not the problem of using a pathological regular expression, but rather a problem of the RE engine that is not optimized to use the faster approach when possible. This is well known problem very well explained on: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html Cheers, Franck -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
