I'd be very interested to see if there actually is a benchmark suite for regexp's. I imagine that this could be an easy area for quite a varied set of results, depending on the expression features included in the actual regexp being tested, and even the nature of the input text. For example, a simple re that just scans for words in a text stream may perform very differently from one that searches for delimited text, has to lookahead for greedy matches, maintains return groups, performs named substitutions, etc.
Without a pretty thorough benchmark suite, I would be dubious of performance claims being very much better than anecdotes. -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
