The name regular expression seems meant to evoke regular languages, whose significance is that they can be recognized in a very straightforward way (by finite s

The name regular expression seems meant to evoke regular languages, whose significance is that they can be recognized in a very straightforward way (by finite state automata) without pathological gotcha cases like this. Perhaps we ought to call them irregular expressions - this kind of behavior is the literal antithesis of what regular means in automata/parsing theory.