I was looking into breaking a Perl IRC bot the other day and couldn't get any of the examples to work (that is, take more than a split second to execute). Does perl now detect these pathological cases and work around them or was I just not trying the examples correctly?
I believe I read somewhere that recent versions of Perl detect certain obviously pathological cases and abort them, but I don't know if they fail silently or display an error. Whether a particular needle is pathological depends on the haystack, too, so it could just be that there was a mismatch between the two in your case.
