What's not well-defined is what steps the underlying implementation takes to arrive at the output,

Yet, "Programming Perl 3rd" lays out 6 very complicated rules describing in detail how the regex engine proceeds (p 197-201). So, Larry at least thinks the steps are/were well defined. I wonder if those steps are in the new edition?

In reply to Re^3: Interesting behavior of regular expression engine by 7stud
in thread Interesting behavior of regular expression engine by lightoverhead

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