re.search much slower then grep on some regular expressions

[Terry Reedy]

Mark Dickinson wrote:
> On Jul 5, 1:54 pm, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:

> Part of the problem is a lack of agreement on what
> 'regular expression' means.

Twenty years ago, there was.  Calling a extended re-derived grammar 
expression like Perl's a 'regular-expression' is a bit like calling a 
Hummer a 'car' -- perhaps to hide its gas-guzzling behavior.

> Strictly speaking, PCREs aren't
> regular expressions at all, for some values of the term
> 'regular expression'.  See
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression