one of the features of ERE is that it's actually a regular language and does not admit expressions which cannot be matched in linear time. introduction of \n backref support into regcomp's ERE parsing was unintentional.
@@ -839,7 +839,7 @@ static reg_errcode_t parse_atom(tre_parse_ctx_t *ctx, const char *s)
s--;
break;
default:
- if (isdigit(*s)) {
+ if (!ere && isdigit(*s)) {
/* back reference */
int val = *s - '0';
node = tre_ast_new_literal(ctx->mem, BACKREF, val, ctx->position);