A very minor note about your comment, you don't need to escape percent signs. You're right that it's not necessary, but I don't fault it.

In the perl5 incarnation, it's been very handy to remember that escaped alphanumerics are special and escaped non-alphanumerics are plain. Thus \s and \3 have special regex meanings while \% and \$ removes any regex meaning and gives literal characters. There are a scant few bits of punctuation which have no meaning in a regex, so I forgive any excess escaping as being more "obvious" or literate to the maintenance coder.

Perl6 turns regex syntax on its head in many ways (and allows interpolation of hashes), so it'll be interesting to see if there's still an easy mnemonic demarcation between special and literal.

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