in reply to serious regex performance degradation after upgrade to perl 5.8 from 5.6

According to your -V output on your 5.8 perl, you're running a threaded version. That slows everything down, even in programs that don't use threads. Your only options are to recompile perl without threads, get a precompiled version from your vendor without threads, or live with it.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated