I'm pretty sure regexes increase the problem space exponentially with a base of 2. See, you don't notice before because in the original quote you encounter "a p

I'm pretty sure regexes increase the problem space exponentially with a base of 2. See, you don't notice before because in the original quote you encounter "a problem" which is 2^1 == 2 problems. But since you brought up regexes and we already had two problems that's 2^2 == 4 problems.