In perl6, the /foo/ operator is qr-ish. However, in certian contexts (bool context, numeric context, stringy context, and basicly any other context that can't hold a regex), that means that the regex will be created, matched against, and then thrown away (that will probably get optimized a fair bit). However, yes, my $goodnames=/@names/ will set $goodnames to a regex that matches when any of the things in @names (taken literaly) match the target.