[Python-Dev] Re: Some questions about maintenance of the regular expression code.

[Tim Peters]

An irony is that *? is almost always used like so:

    .*? some_literal_string

where the user *intends* "search right for the first appearance of
some_literal_string, and chew up the characters until then".  If that's what
.*? actually meant (it doesn't), it could be implemented very efficiently
without recursion.  Instead, regexp engines work supernaturally hard to
implement something few users understand, and very few actually want.  I
love regexps <wink>.