Dirty Secrets of the Perl Regex Engine

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Endnotes


Yak!

The picture on slide 3 worried me. People at TPC can be very conservative, and I was afraid of offending someone. After YAPC, I asked several people for advice. Almost everyone advised me to remove the picture. Sarathy was the lone voice of reason, and I took his advice and left it in. It was quite a success.

I had hoped that perhaps this slide would trigger someone in the audience to vomit for real, and in my darkest fantasies I sometimes imagined that this might set off a chain reaction, leaving me in front of an audience of a hundred people all barfing at once, but alas, it didn't happen. Perhaps next year.

It was surprisingly difficult to locate this picture. You would think that the internet would be brimming with vomit pictures, but every vomit-related site I visited had the same three or four examples. I guess you have to pay a subscription fee to see the really good stuff.

Missing Persons

The woman on Slide 14 is Amelia Earhart, who vanished mysteriously in 1937 while flying her airplane over regcomp.c.


Similarly, Slide 9 depicts Glenn Miller, who reputedly delved too deeply into the forbidden mysteries of (?{EXPR}) and was was devoured alive in public by a horde of invisible demons.


Jimmy Hoffa's body has never been located. The Perl regex engine is believed to be involved somehow, but nobody is talking.

Other Remarks

One additional point about the Glenn Miller slide: It may not be immediately clear what the comment /* XXX runtime compiled output needs to move to the pad */ means.

As I explained in the talk, the English translation of this comment is /* DOES NOT WORK UNDER THREADS */


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