I understand the points that were made here. Heck, I made most of those points myself in my question.

But deep down, I have a problem with the fact the following regex won't match if the /x modifier is on by default:

$str = 'Hello World!';

# This will NOT match in Perl6?
print 'Matched' if $str =~ /Hello World/;
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I admit that new users already have to become aware of many special regex metacharacters. I just think that using the space character as a metacharacter is perhaps non-intuitive.

I agree that the pattern /Hello\s+World/ is usually more "correct". But the pattern /Hello World/ is often perfectly usable, and it's also much easier to understand. In my humble opinion, anything which makes a simple "Hello World" example fail gives a programming language a steeper learning curve.

buckaduck