If you think about it, there are only two reasonable choices for this: minimalist and maximalist (aka greedy) matching. In Perl (and every other regex syntax I know of) the default is to make the matching greedy; furthermore, Perl gives you the option to make the matching minimalist if that's what you want. As far as I can tell, this choice is arbitrary; it could have gone the other way.

But I'm just guessing here, and I could easily be wrong (i.e. there may be some fundamental reason for which maximalist matching is a more reasonable default than minimalist matching); if so, I look forward to being corrected.

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: greedy search by tlm
in thread greedy search by palette

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