Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers

Question

I found this excellent tutorial on regular expressions and while I intuitively understand what \"greedy\", \"reluctant\" and \"possessive\" quantifiers do, there seems to be

Answer 1

Greedy: "match the longest possible sequence of characters"

Reluctant: "match the shortest possible sequence of characters"

Possessive: This is a bit strange as it does NOT (in contrast to greedy and reluctant) try to find a match for the whole regex.

By the way: No regex pattern matcher implementation will ever use backtracking. All real-life pattern matcher are extremely fast - nearly independent of the complexity of the regular expression!