Agreed, the impedance of parsers has traditionally been much higher than for regexps. However, a lot of languages now have some sort of parse combinator library

Agreed, the impedance of parsers has traditionally been much higher than for regexps. However, a lot of languages now have some sort of parse combinator library which dramatically increases the ease of writing a parser. I'm thinking specifically of the Parsec inspired family, which has implementations or derivations in many common languages, even C# and Java (despite being noticably more cumbersome in those cases there). [I cannot speak for perl 6, but i trust you are correct]