Re: RFC 158 (v1) Regular Expression Special Variables

[Tom Christiansen]

>$`, $& and $' are useful variables which are never used by any
>experienced Perl hacker since they have well known problems with
>efficiency. 

That's hardly true.  I could show you plenty of code from
inexperienced Perl hackers like lwall that use them.  But
the cost in understood.  :-)

The rest of what you said probably is reasonable, however.

The (.*?)(blah)(.*) solution kind works sometimes, but is 
hardly pleasant.  Likewise the @+ and @- stuff.

There's also long been talk/thought about making $& and $1 
and friends magic aliases into the original string, which would
save that cost.

--tom