. The dot (".") never matches newlines, which keeps line-oriented idioms from accidentally spanning newlines [1]
. Changes must be sequential and non-overlapping (that's why I deleted the whole thing before processing in the third example).
. Sam matches only the original input, not past changes.
. Addresses (expressions before commands) select a single range, x commands select multiple ranges and loop over it.
[1]: https://p9f.org/sys/doc/sam/sam.html, Regular expressions