The term “memories” to label the side effects of parentheses has fallen out of favor. The new hotness is “capture group”, although that has sometimes showed up as “capture buffer” in the documentation. Karl Williamson, however, purged the docs of “capture buffer”, so you shouldn’t see that anywhere in Perl 5.14’s docs. This mostly affects Chapter 8, where we introduce the match variables, even though we have grouping and backreferences in Chapter 7.
I’m not so sure I like “groups” everywhere though. I think that’s the right term to apply to the particular parentheses that triggered the capture, but not necessarily the thing actually captured. It’s the difference between asking which team is in the Super Bowl and who’s on the Super Bowl team.
I don’t really care that much, though, because there’s one overriding concern: we need to use the same terms that are in the documentation so people have the right search terms.
Perl 6 has a thing called captures, but that’s a completely different beast.