No, they will probably even tend to be longer due to defaulting to /x.

Seems what Larry was after is readability and extensibility though. Writing complex parsers that need to chain multiple regexes is not exactly trivial in Perl5, possible as it may be. The big deal with Perl6 patterns is the fact that they get promoted to actual control flow structures in and of themselves, and that interdependent groups of regexen get to enjoy the same benefits as classes/objects already do.

Makeshifts last the longest.

They don't realize character classes outnumber closures 100 to 1...

From what I gather, the issue here is mostly Unicode -- literal character classes are a bad idea with Unicode data, so making them longer, and in effect discouraging their use, isn't considered a bad thing. This assumes, of course, that a significant number of people actually use non-ASCII a significant amount of the time. I really don't have the experience to comment on this last assumption.

/s