Interesting, but flawed re regexen and what the writer choses to call "additional shortcuts ...to simplify the creation of regex statements."

For instance, if you are looking for a long string of identical letters, you can just indicate the number of letters in the string, instead typing out each letter. In other words, with the current version of Perl, you'd type "aaaaa" to indicate you are looking for 5 letter a's. In Perl 6, you need type only "a**5." There, the 5 indicates the number of letter a's you seek.

You can also specify ranges with this technique: "y ** 3..5" means you are looking for a string of y's from 3 to 5 characters long.

The base example, "aaaaa" ignores character classes and quantifiers, which is understandable in a brief article aimed as much at a general IT audience as at Perl devs, But for the dev, it raises the question "is the first a**5 somehow different from [a]{5}and y ** 3..5 different from [y]{3,5} in ways other than the number of keystrokes?" (I suspect the answer is "no.")

FWIW, this is not a bash on Perl 6, but that section of the article suggests (for /me; YMMV) that the reporter's understanding of his subject and diligence in crafting the report may be suspect.