Perl is still, I think, the gold standard for quoting and string manipulation syntax. I am to this day routinely perplexed by the verbosity and ugliness of sim

Perl is still, I think, the gold standard for quoting and string manipulation syntax. I am to this day routinely perplexed by the verbosity and ugliness of simple operations on strings in other languages. (Of course, this may also be one of the reasons that programmers in its broad language family have a pronounced tendency to shoehorn too many problems into complex string manipulation, but I suppose no capability comes without its psychological costs.)