[Melbourne-pm] An old one but an important one
Jacinta Richardson
jarich at perltraining.com.au
Sun Jan 20 21:59:37 PST 2008
Tim Connors wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Scott Penrose wrote:
>
>> And for those who don't know.
>>
>> $& $' or $` anywhere in the code found by the compiler makes all
>> regular expressions slow, not just the ones where it is used.
>>
>> (sorry about the separate emails)
>
> Crap. I was always under the impression that $& $' and $` were esoteric
> things that are only used by perlre gurus.
>
> But perlre(1) tells me that parentheses and $1, $2,... use them internally
> with the huge performance hit, but (at least) don't come with the cost of
> slowing down all uses of REs.
>
> I wonder how much of my own code uses parentheses avoidably?
Probably a lot. The (?: construct is ugly and I sometimes I don't remember
which order the : and ? go in. Still, although it's slower than it needs to be,
it doesn't have the same performance impact on _every_ other regular expression
in your program. Using $&, $' or $` does affect every regular expression,
because Perl cannot tell in advance (at compile time) which regular expression
will set $& etc before its use, and thus has to set them for each and every
expression just in case.
Jacinta
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