I had the same idea a few years ago, and implemented it in PCRE. The author of PCRE reworked the implementation but kept the idea, and it's been a standard feature of PCRE since then. I still think it's very cool, but I don't know whether anyone actually uses it...

I didn't have the guts to try and do it for perl's regex engine. If you do it, it might be worth considering using the same syntax as PCRE?

In reply to Re^2: Perl6ish rules in Perl5's regex engine by robin
in thread Perl6ish rules in Perl5's regex engine by demerphq

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