Is Perl *that* good?

[Roy Smith]

Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote:

> >>>>> "Asun" == Asun Friere <afriere at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> 
>     Asun> Wouldn't you need to import the re module and compile the
>     Asun> pattern first?  (And wouldn't you use 'search' rather than
>     Asun> 'match'?)  And
> 
> I rarely compile regexps, just pass the string to the re functions.

For the occasional ad-hoc match, this is fine.  The advantage of 
pre-compiling is that it's faster, since it doesn't have to recompile 
the regex each time.

I don't see anything in the reference manual which says re.match() 
caches compilations, but I suspect it does.  Even a trivial check for 
"thisRegEx is lastRegEx" would be sufficient to negate the speed 
advantage of pre-compiling in most cases.  Anybody know if it does this?