> However, for the most part, the "efficiency" argument is off base. You can COMPILE regular expressions into tight code. When I started programming ocaml, I w

> However, for the most part, the "efficiency" argument is off base. You can COMPILE regular expressions into tight code. When I started programming ocaml, I was surprised to find no string primitives for things like split, find, etc... There was only regex. I didn't want to write a regex for doing a simple find or split, so I wrote a string library for my programs. My string library was consistently 4x faster than regex and did only exactly what I wanted.