I have to mildly disagree. I agree that /^$bar$/ is a dumb regex, but often string literal regexes without either the ^ or the $ are a perfectly reasonable idea.

Now it may be the sort of scripts I've been writing recently, but I almost never find an occasion to use the "eq" operator. And it isn't just that I want case insensitive matches. It's most often whitespace or added junk characters. If I'm trying to match the string "foobar" I don't really care if it is actually "foobar ". Or if I'm looking for the string "no such file or directory" I don't care if I hit "no such file or directory at line 26 of foobar.pl". So I'll use /^no such file or directory/i without a second thought.

So I'm not really sure how strict you were being in your definition of patterns (personally, when I read the word "pattern" I think of masses of '\'ed characters), but I often find regexes a nice fit for matching plain old strings with a bit of leeway. I don't know if I'm interpreting you as being more draconian than you intended, but there is a place for regexes in certain types of string comparison.

But /^$bar$/ really is dumb. Although my personal favorite for stupid regexes is /.*$bar.*/

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