Thank you for your quick answer, and thanks again for taking the time to explain. Although I agree that the two regular expressions have different meanings, the real question here is why Perl 5.6.1 is 500-1,000 times faster than Perl 5.8.0 on the same regular expression -- this is my real query. Am I to assume that Perl 5.6.1 did not properly parse certain regular expressions and Perl 5.8.0 now does? I just tried your regular expressions and they yielded the same results under both versions. How unstable is my previous code, if new versions can make it obsolete in performance, as if encouraging not to upgrade.