Does the quantifier {0} make sense in some scenarios?

Question

Example:

/(?:Foo){0}bar/

I saw something like this in another answer. At first I thought \"what should that be\", but then, \"OK could make sense, kind of a

Answer 1

In traditional regular expressions, /x{0}/ (language = { xⁿ : x = 0}) would mean "match exactly 0 of x", which is the same thing as // (language = { Λ }). Since the two are equivalent, you should be able to remove any /x{0}/ you find lying around.

But PCREs and other extensions to regular expressions can get quite byzantine. I would not be surprised if /x{0}/ did something in Perl. I would be disgusted, but not surprised.

I think it's probably some artifact of a program that automatically generates regular expressions but doesn't simplify them. Which is a shame, since it's so easy to write programs that simplify regular expressions.