In addition to what AnomalousMonk said. Plain regular expressions can be constructed to be DoS attacks; even unintentionally. The handling varies from Perl version to version and I am pretty sure regular expressions were impossible to interrupt with a timeout historically so the "attack" was impossible to guard against. I have no idea if this is still the case in newer versions or when it changed if it did.

In reply to Re^5: creating qr from existing regex by Your Mother
in thread creating qr from existing regex by Bobert1234

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