The regular expressions in Ruby, Perl and Python supported "extended syntax" for a long time (x flag). For an example, see the first first section http://www.pe

The regular expressions in Ruby, Perl and Python supported "extended syntax" for a long time (x flag). For an example, see the first first section http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/01/16/regexps.html (this is perl , ruby is very similar). I think the article would be easier to read if all the regexes were in extended form, but I suppose that author is an expert regex user, so the examples were easy enough for him. And finally, perl6 totally re-did text matching with "grammars" (https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars.html https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars.html) -- they use much more readable syntax, nameable groups, etc... It really is quite a wonderful thing, I with it was available in other languages.