[slimsag]

Regex engines don't just parse regular languages - that ship sailed a long time ago. As I understand it, any regex engine supporting backtracking is no longer working with regular languages.

As the author of Perl's regex engine Larry Wall puts it[0]:

> “Regular expressions” […] are only marginally related to real regular expressions. Nevertheless, the term has grown with the capabilities of our pattern matching engines, so I’m not going to try to fight linguistic necessity here. I will, however, generally call them “regexes” (or “regexen”, when I’m in an Anglo-Saxon mood).

[0] https://raku.org/archive/doc/design/apo/A05.html