Re: RFC 158 (v1) Regular Expression Special Variables

[Mark-Jason Dominus]

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

Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe that that's the way
they are implemented now.  A regex match populates the ->startp and
->endp parts of the regex structure, and the elements of these items
are byte offsets into the original string.