"Chas Owens" schreef: > Alternations are notoriously inefficient in Perl due to how the regex > engine works. Perl 5.10 fixes this, at least somewhat, by using > something called Tries (which are something like trees, but I don't > fully understand them yet),
These tries are a method of optimisation, basically meaning that /bomb|boss/ is optimised to /bo(?:mb|ss)/. A "common-prefix" technique. Could also be used for an anchored postfix of course. So alternations are merged into a tree, character by character (for at least the first few characters). -- Affijn, Ruud "Gewoon is een tijger." -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/