Hmm .. but isn't the zero implied by the null field?

Not really, I don't think.
If perl accepted {,X}, I'm pretty sure some people would assume that it stood for {1,X}, not {0,X}. After all, one to X matches makes more sense than zero to X matches in many situations.
It's propably best to force people to make an explicit choice.

In reply to Re^3: Oddness with regex quantifiers by elef
in thread Oddness with regex quantifiers by talexb

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