If you look at the bug it's not a problem caused by using regular expressions as such, but rather by the choice of date to be "grossly in the future" (ie. so f

If you look at the bug it's not a problem caused by using regular expressions as such, but rather by the choice of date to be "grossly in the future" (ie. so far in to the future that it couldn't be a legitimate date at the time the software is running). The regex was chosen to match 2010 to 2099, which it did just fine. So problem wasn't in choosing to use regex's but in choosing 2010 as the date. I'm sure that date was "grossly in the future" at some point (probably when the regex was first written), but obviously we are living in the future now and need the date to be moved forward.