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

[Tom Christiansen]

>> More generally, it seems to me that you're hung up on the description 
>> of "*?" as "shortest possible match".  That's an ambiguous 

>Yup, that's a bit confusing.  It's really "start matching as soon as
>possible, and stop matching as soon as possible".  (The usual greedy
>one is, of course, "keep matching as long as possible".)  The initial
>invariant part, "start as soon as possible", is the de facto and de
>jure (at least POSIX 1003.2, but probably also Single Unix)
>definition, and therefore rather non-negotiable.

It's like people who write /^.*fred/ instead of /.*fred/.  They
are forgetting something critical: where the Engine starts the serach.

--tom