Both of these examples would require implementation of a regex engine to provide the same set of functionality. You’ve just given the syntactic sugar next to t

Both of these examples would require implementation of a regex engine to provide the same set of functionality. You’ve just given the syntactic sugar next to the ast parse, parsing a regex into an ast representation is fairly easy and can be done with recursive descent (it is trivial). But this is supposed to be about DSLs not parsing, the DSL is either, because you’ve just given the DSL in two different forms. (One with sugar, one without).