As the possessive quantifier is
just a shorthand for the independent subexpression (?>pattern), which
was introduced with 5.8, wouldn't it be just easier to rewrite these
few rules and avoid the possessive quantifier, along with all their
conditionals.
The widest possible support does generally seem desirable, especially
since the existing rules can be rewritten to handle older perl
versions.
In the just released perl 5.21.9 there are some nice features:
Core Enhancements
qr/\b{gcb}/ is now handled in regular expressions
gcb stands for Grapheme Cluster Boundary. It is a Unicode property that
finds the boundary between sequences of characters that look like a
single
character to a native speaker of a language. Perl has long had the
ability
to deal with these through the \X regular escape sequence. Now, there
is
an alternative way of handling these. See "\b{}, \b, \B{}, \B" in
perlrebackslash for details.
qr/\b{wb}/ is now handled in regular expressions
wb stands for Word Boundary. It is a Unicode property that finds the
boundary between words. This is similar to the plain \b (without
braces)
but is more suitable for natural language processing. It knows, for
example
that apostrophes can occur in the middle of words. See "\b{}, \b, \B{},
\B"
in perlrebackslash for details.
qr/\b{sb}/ is now handled in regular expressions
sb stands for Sentence Boundary. It is a Unicode property to aid in
parsing natural language sentences. See "\b{}, \b, \B{}, \B" in
perlrebackslash for details.
Looks like we won't be able to use these for the next twenty years 8-}
Mark
