On 15/02/2012 01:43, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:05 PM, MRAB<pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com>
wrote:
And yeah, even something as crazy as ()* works, but as soon as
it becomes (a*)* it doesn't work. Weird.
I think it's a combination of warning the user about something
that's pointless, as in the case of "$*", and producing a pattern
which could cause the internal regex engine to get stuck in an
infinite loop.
Considering that ()* works fine, I can't imagine it ever gets stuck
in infinite loops. But I admit I am too lazy to check against the
interpreter.
Also, complete failure is an exceptionally (heh) poor way of warning
people about stuff. I hope that's not really it.
There is one place in the re engine where it tries to avoid getting
stuck in an infinite loop because of a zero-width match, but the fix
inadvertently causes another bug. It's described in issue #1647489.
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