> and ensure that they never enter the world of ridiculous step count.

Sidenote: Are you aware of the Halting problem?

In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever.

Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

update

though there is an ongoing discussion if Perl RegExes (without embedded (?{Perl code}) ) are Turing complete and which features should be stripped off to make them "uncomplete".

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

In reply to Re: regex step counting (Halting problem) by LanX
in thread regex step counting by Random_Walk

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