Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!mcnc!uvaarpa!mmdf
From: marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl-Users Digest #651
Message-ID: <1991Mar9.230553.22037@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 9 Mar 91 23:05:53 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23

|> From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
|> 
|> From the keyboard of emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti):
|> :Speaking of which, what's the limits on the number of parentheses that
|> :a regular expression can have?  I got an unpleasant message
|> :
|> :/^(scan)\s+((-(\w*))|)\s*\+(\w*)((s+((||>)(.*)))|)/: too many () in regexp at /u:1/emv/bin/smoke line 167, <> line 1.
|> 
|> Nine.  To accept more, Larry would have to change the code that
|> recognizes \1 .. \9 and $1 .. .$9.
|> 
|> --tom

Ok, that explains it, but it doesn't excuse it.  Sometimes I want to
match an expression complex enough (like Ed's example) that I need
more than nine () to group everything.  In this case, perl should
still work, and I would say that the regexp in an array context should
contain as many elements as paren pairs, but that $1 .. $9 should
contain the first nine () matches.

Comments?

		Marc