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Looks cool; I've checked this in unchanged, except changing
one comment: the comment about the test for bug 545855 said
it would generate errors during matching, while when I try
it, the pattern generates a TypeError during compilation. I
don't feel capable to review the code you added to _sre.c;
I'll assign it to Fredrik, but I don't expect him to have
time to look at it. It seems you haven't broken his
requirement for this code to work back to Python 1.5.2. I'll
backport to Python 2.2 as well.

Do I understand correctly that the .*? addition is all Greg
Chapman's work?