I admit spending too little time on the post, while waiting to go into a class and on a rather fickle wifi connection, so I guess I kind of deserve your reply. That said: 1) I did consider Meditations, but picked Seekers of Perl Wisdom instead; 2) I assume at least some of the monks here are fans of regular expressions and have read about the absent operator, so I need not present much introductory materials.

I have no strong opinion yet on the feature, perhaps will only do so after finding some practical use-case for it and seeing its performance characteristics.