I would like to support Perl 5.8, apart from the fact that raw regex looks quite ugly.
A huge advantage of patterns like i'm using them is that you can rebuild the path very easily.
The /foo/123 /foo/abc example is already possible since patterns get compiled to regex internally.
$r->route('/:(number)_:(word)/foo', number => qr/\d+/, word => qr/\w+/
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