Re: Finding C style comments using isearch-forward-regexp

["Stefan Monnier <foo@acm.com>" <monnier+gnu.emacs.help/news/@flint.cs.yale.edu>]

>> It will avoid matching past the comment-end, but it doesn't prevent the
>> regexp routines from pushing stuff on the stack in case we need
>> to backtrack (the routines are not clever enough).
> Hm.  Does that mean that even, say, .* on a file with a single very
> long line will put too much stuff on the stack?

Depends.  ".*\n" or ".*$" will not because the regexp routines recognize
this case and don't push anything on the stack for it, but
".*(" will definitely push stuff and will thus lead to the same
error if the line is long enough.

> Is there a way to tell the routines to never backtrack?  I think
> there is a way for Perl, and Perlish things went into the Emacs
> regexp engine...

Perl has a way to throw away part of the stack frames (it's basically
equivalent to the `!' construct of Prolog, a.k.a. cut).
It's not implemented in Emacs.


        Stefan