Many years ago, I wondered how Ken Thompson's 1968 ACM article on implementing regexes in IBM 7040 would look in x86. Ken uses two lists for current and next backtracking and I replaced one of them by the call stack (interleaving call and ret in weird order). I remember struggling with some assembly syntax (AXC **,7 as it were) so I emailed Mr. Thompson! And Ken, ever the gentleman, took ample time to reply to a no-name n00b! Several years later, Russ Cox of Go fame somehow heard about my silly hack, reached out, and included it on his page about "Implementing Regular Expressions" (https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/).