alt Hacker NewsDo you mean most of uses of grep are backreferencing? In my 30-yr career I did not use regex backrefs once except for learning them.
Do you mean most of uses of grep are backreferencing? In my 30-yr career I did not use regex backrefs once except for learning them.
No, it just gets much more complicated to implement grep both in general, and especially in hardware if you support backreferences, since those make it impossible to compile the regular expression into a state machine.