Perl is a messy, maddening programming language, the “duct tape of the internet.” But at least you can tell it was made by humans.

Hard to believe, but the 'Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages' and high-class glue holding the Internet together is 25 years young today.

To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest version of the Korn shell (referred to as “korn93”) supports associative arrays.

After reading I became curious as to why Perl and other languages features regular expression don't use the Thompson NFA approach. Can someone out there enlighten me?