Fellows
A friend of mine pointed me to a paper published by the ACM that describes a new kind of regular expression engine, that, as far as I understand, is able to match (by the aproximate match technique) hundreds of regular expressions against one text in O( ln( x ) ) (!!!!!). If this is true, I guess we will need to reimplement (or, at least, review) our regular expressions engine.

I'm learning about this and don't know a lot about Approximated Matching, but it seems to be a generalization of the Exact Pattern Match problem (that's Perl's current regular expression engine technique).

I guess this kind of pattern matching is a subproduct from the biology efforts on the Genoma Project and other genetic sequencing projects arround the world, and that this have enough maturity to guarantee a new implementation of a regular expression engine to Perl.

I also googled for and found a handful of papers on the subject of multiple string matching by Gonzalo Navarro, a researcher at the Computer Science Department, University of Chile.

Seems to me that maybe its time to start thinking about a new Regular Expression Engine for Perl, maybe as an add-on extension, so we don't need to break support to old applications. This can help Perl to solve problems faster and simpler, allowing us to solve more with even less code.

In reply to The Dream of a New, Faster Regular Expression Engine by monsieur_champs

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