Frankly, I find the Perl documentation quite badly written years ago and I gave up on it.

Back to the non-greedy matching, I understand what you are saying. It's just that's not the normal and usual understanding of the word. To my mind, and I would bet most of the world, since the expression was (*.?\|) that would mean the least number of characters before the next - stress that next - \|.

That's what "non-greedy" should mean, IMO. Perl's implementation still greedy.