One interesting side-effect to cogitate on is that regular expressions would then be applied to lists. It seems like that might be useful, but would require some expansion of the atomic matchers (what currently match individual characters).
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Comment on Re: Representing all data as Lists (Perl7?)
If you like that, you could play with Mathematica. It has a poweful pattern-matching engine that works with any kind of data, like lists of lists of etc, not only strings. (From version 5.1, it also has a separate regexp matcher for strings only.)