POSIX Regular Expression Funnyness

[Andrew Hume]

the new ctype style goo in regular expressions only applies inside
[] expressions in order to ease compatability problems.

i have been following the regular expression stuff and most of
it seems okay, even if it is cumbersome.

the thing that pisses me off is that they want to make \c where c is
a regular (non-special) character exactly equivalent to c,
rather than reserving it for future use. this is baffling to me;
if we reserve \c in these cases, we have easy backward compatible ways
of extending the syntax later on (like allowing more than 9 sub expressions).
And i have no idea who they are protecting; people who have patterns
like \t and expect them to match t ??