1. * in BRE is not special at the beginning of the regex or a
subexpression. this broke ncurses' build scripts.

2. \\( in BRE is a literal \ followed by a literal (, not a literal \
followed by a subexpression opener.

3. the ^ in \\(^ in BRE is a literal ^ only at the beginning of the
entire BRE. POSIX allows treating it as an anchor at the beginning of
a subexpression, but TRE's code for checking if it was at the
beginning of a subexpression was wrong, and fixing it for the sake of
supporting a non-portable usage was too much trouble when just
removing this non-portable behavior was much easier.

this patch also moved lots of the ugly logic for empty atom checking
out of the default/literal case and into new cases for the relevant
characters. this should make parsing faster and make the code smaller.
if nothing else it's a lot more readable/logical.

at some point i'd like to revisit and overhaul lots of this code...