On Jan 7, 2011, at 3:10 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote: > On 1/7/2011 1:23 PM, Jim Jagielski wrote: >> >> /a.*b/ >> >> How big will that be? > > Oh it's certainly possible to create some very impractical patterns... > /<html>.*</html>/ comes to mind. The pattern space in these cases is > infinite, or rather, the size of the remaining document once an /a/ is > sited in your example above. >
Yeah, that's the rub. For regular patterns, then we can (and should) be smarter, since we *know* the max size we are looking for... for regexes, it's hard to get "much" better ;)
