Ah yes, sorry, it would have been more correct to say "perl's REs lacked recursion at the time ". I use PCRE pretty frequently, so knew that it's supported recu

Ah yes, sorry, it would have been more correct to say "perl's REs lacked recursion at the time ". I use PCRE pretty frequently, so knew that it's supported recursion for some time; but it's been a while since I've done anything non-trivial with perl itself, so couldn't remember if it too had that functionality or I was just getting their feature-sets confused. Evidently I guessed wrong - thanks for the correction.