I like the idea of making /x the default, and I think it may actually make learning regexps easier for a newcomer.

I found non-literal white space strange in regexps also, but that's mainly from having used sed, grep, etc., for umpty-ump years. If you're just learning the language, I think it's a lot easier to understand something like:

A regular expression is formed from one or more elements that are processed in sequence, much like statements and blocks are executed. You may line up these elements any way you like, since white space is not significant between them; you may use comments freely, just like the rest of your code.
Then it doesn't seem weird to use \s+ to match whitespace. It makes it clear that regular expressions are much closer to code than to literal strings -- the only other place where white space is interpreted literally.

When I first learned Perl REs, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that all \ specials are alphabetic. I think being told that I could line them up any way I wanted would have been the icing on the cake.

In reply to Re: /x on regexes in Perl6? by VSarkiss
in thread /x on regexes in Perl6? by buckaduck

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.