Thanks. My application is a verilog authoring tool that includes a perl based parser (using m/\G//). It also allow users to embed perl that I "eval". So, I am not the author of all code. If the user code uses "$&" then my tool slows down 20X. It is a big deal to this program. The parser re-evaluates the front/back of a huge string with every string search. My program crawls.