From: "Pedro Côrte-Real" Date: 2006-07-28T22:34:52+09:00 Subject: Re: Slow regular expressions :( On 7/28/06, Alexandru E. Ungur wrote: > I wouldn't prefer Ruby to think for me, and I very much like when > it says: " - You moron, look what you did: I'm gonna stay stuck on > this regex for 56783.99 years, and all because of you!! Can you > even wait that long?!?" so that slowly I become less of a moron... > I would definitely not like it to say: " - All is good, feed me crap, > I can take it. I have a good stomach.", and let me go away with it. > But maybe that's just me... I don't talk to my programming language nearly as much, though perhaps I should :). But I agree with this. I've had regexes that degenerated into such pathological cases once or twice and I've just fixed them. Fixing ruby would hide the bug. That being said this is just one more reason I'm afraid of regexes. When they grow beyond very short I start to get nervous. That's probably how AI will develop and enslave us all, by some random noise being interpreted as a regex... Which is one more reason not to fix this, to slow down our evil overlords. :) Pedro.