What I had figured, after reading that in the docs, was "Welp, you can do just about anything in Perl just about any way you want to, I wonder if I can break that behavior somehow?"

While we're on the subject, let me run my interpretation of what's going on "behind the scenes" with the engine by y'all, to see if I understand it correctly. Let's take the simple pattern:

"444440000" =~ /(/d*)(0{3,10})/

So, the first thing it tries to do is give the /d* as much as possible, so the /d* is trying to match the whole string. Then there aren't enough zeros to match the second part, so it gives up and backs up, trying to put one less character into (/d*). It continues to fail and back up one character less until it comes out with a match.

So in the above example, it tries things out like the following?

/d*            0{3,10}
444440000      nothing
44444000       0
4444400        00
444440         000 (Success!)
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