That's not a very smart idea. Under a certain commercial operating system that shall remain nameless, 0xa0 maps to á.

I have some scripts that would be seriously bent by such a change in semantics of \s.

OTOH, it would be very nice to be able to define you own idea of what \s (and cohorts) should represent... I can't count the number of times I match [A-Za-z0-9] because I don't want the underscore. I know I can match [^_\w] but people find that a little obfuscated around here. (clarification: where here means where I work, not the monastery).

<update date="2005-01-08"> Note that the [^_\W] trick does not work as expected with 5.8 when Unicode comes in to play...</update>