I scanned this article, and noted quickly that it is way beyond my scope of knowledge, or interest for that matter. I am very attached to Perl for my own reasons, but not so much so that I don't like to explore other ways of doing things, or attempting to understand how all that CS black magic works, and why there might be better ways to implement the underlying workings.

I always get that little mental twinge when something someone says or writes implies that my tool of choice is less than it should be (even though that is not really what is being said). This is relatively natural, and of course I go read about it and others peoples thought on the matter to see just how blindly religious I have become about my preferences.

From the perspective of a self-taught perl user, the answer to the question "...felt that Perl regexp was slow...needed to be improved", the answer is no. As I understand it, the "P" in perl is for "Practical". Practical for me means something that gets the job done. Perl does extraction and reporting very nicely, and is therefor practical. If Perl's only job was to do regex's, then it is probably not as fast as it should be. But that is not Perls' only job.

Back in the day when I worked for Cray Research, our job was to build the fastest super-computers in the world. The machines we built were pretty darn good at what they did, modeling complex problems. But they were not the fastest at everything, or even the best for all large scale problems. They were (and in some cases still are) the most practical tools to use for certain kinds of problems, in certain environments.

Perl is like that for me. Are other tools better at some of the things that Perl can do? Yes. Is Perl the best at regex's? I don't know, maybe not. What I do know is that Perl is the practical tool to use for so many of the jobs that I do, that whatever 5%, 10% or even 30% increase I could get out of using something else is just not worth the risk or the learning curve. If someone wants to tweak the underpinnings of the tool to make it faster at something, fine. Just don't turn the world up-side-down doing it. I am too damn old to make the adustment :-)

So, from my rather simple perspective, I will take the practical advantages of Perl, and not let myself worry too much about that little twinge I felt at the question about my favorite tool ..... :-) Sometimes I have to just laugh at myself, and give everyone else the opportunity to join me!! lol