Re: RFC 158 (v1) Regular Expression Special Variables

[Tom Christiansen]

>> 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.  

I haven't looked at it at all, and perhaps that 's sometihng Ilya
idd when creating @+ etc.  So you might be right.  

Yet if so, I don't see the great fears of massive copies
for once-ever use of $` and all, since I should have thought
that that would have addressed it.

--tom