Larry Wall Proposes Big Changes to Regex Syntax

“Regex culture has gone wrong in a variety of ways, but it’s not my intent to assign blame–there’s plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of things that have gone wrong that are nobody’s fault in particular. …

“Given all this, I need to warn you that this Apocalypse is going to be somewhat radical. We’ll be proposing changes to certain ‘sacred’ features of regex culture, and this is guaranteed to result in future shock for some of our more conservative citizens. Do not be alarmed.”