Erlang downsides?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

	> Exactly.  And other dynamic languages--including Ruby and
	> Python--simply link to the standard Perl regular expression library.
	
For what it's worth, as part of the Mawk maintenance project this year,
I had my 3rd-year students look at the possibility of replacing Mawk's
own regexp code with PCRE.  There were two major problems:

(1) For GAWK-compatibility, and also because it seemed like the right thing
    to do, we've made Mawk allow \0 inside strings.  The PCRE interface
    doesn't allow that.

(2) The Perl semantics for regular expression matching is incompatible
    with the POSIX standard.