I would want "abcdef" =~ m/..*..*./g to return 20 = 6 choose 3 matches.

Hmmm... that's not quite the same thing I was talking about. How is Perl to know that .* is different from . ?

Easy: imagine I was matching m/\w.*\w.*\w/g instead. There really is no other possibility than have this return 20 matches (each \w has to match one of the 6 letters). Here are some more examples of what I would want (assuming I made no mathematical mistakes):

• "abcdef" =~ m/..*..*./g   returns 20 = 6 choose 3
• "abcdef" =~ m/.*/g   returns 28 = (6+2) choose 2 = number of substrings of length 6 string
• "abcdef" =~ m/....*/g   returns 10 = number of length 3 or greater substrings of length 6 string
• "abcdef" =~ m/^.*$/g   returns 1
• "abcdef" =~ m/^.*.*$/g   returns 7 = number of ways of splitting a length 6 string into two parts