It's beautiful. It's simple. It's powerful. It's Perlish.

Yeah, it's as beautiful as regular expressions in C. Just like Perl's OO system, C has powerful regular expressions. C gives you arrays of integers, and with that, you can build any regular expression system you want. You want a DFA? Then use a DFA. You want POSIX matching rules? Go ahead, and do so. NFA? C isn't stopping you. Variable with lookbehind? Go on, just do it - C is giving you all the tools you need.

As you can see, due to it's simplicity, C's regular expressions are way more powerful and flexible than Perls.