Hmmm ... I read the paper and didn't see anything that resembled an attack. To me it felt more like:

"Hey gang, there was a fork in regex technology XX years ago and the fork we're on now has some pathological cases. This other fork doesn't have those pathological cases, but has these other shortcomings. Perhaps we can take the creamy caramel center of the NFA and wrap them in the chocolaty goodness of DFA and get something much tastier?"

I totally agree with your reasoning of why we don't need to go that route. On the other hand, since reading the paper, my gears have been a-grinding with attempts at finding a way to merge backtracking into DFA without consuming insane amounts of storage. It's quite an entertaining mental exercise, even though I've gotten nowhere yet. (I don't actually expect to get anywhere, but it's still fun to try...)

--roboticus

In reply to Re^2: Perl regexp matching is slow?? by roboticus
in thread Perl regexp matching is slow?? by smahesh

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