Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > To be clear the point of my mail was not to say "I can't think of a > way to support both of these things, help!", obviously we can continue > to maintain two codepaths. The point was to raise the idea that we > could simply remove the more complex & doomed to forever be slow > codepath. To be clear, the point of my response was that these features must remain. As long as they are more convenient than sifting through output produced by pattern matching engine that is less powerful (which forces the user to give wider pattern than desired, to avoid false negatives) with eyeball, having to match each pattern one by one, instead of being able to use a combined and more efficient single pattern, is still more efficient for the end user, which is the point of using a computer.