Perl 6 is completely redesigning the regex syntax. It's now a lot clearer, more flexible and more optimizable. Can we use (a subset of) this in the std.regex library? For an overview, see http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/docs/Perl6/Spec/S05-regex.pod is more up-to-date, but it has less rationale and fewer examples.