As others have said, regex only works well because you have a sophisticated implementation underneath. SQL is fine and good, but the syntax part is easy - hund

As others have said, regex only works well because you have a sophisticated implementation underneath. SQL is fine and good, but the syntax part is easy - hundreds of ORMs, and LINQ, let you express SQL in native-language syntaxes, e.g.: Select(columns=['fname', 'lname'], table='People', where=Equals('fname', 'bob')) The challenge is in the under-the-hood query optimization, finding the best index to use, caching results in memory, using highly efficient on-disk data structures etc. That stuff is usually written in a procedural language (though it could perhaps be done functionally etc.). So while Racket might make the parsing and transformation to Racket constructs easier, that's just a tiny aspect of making an efficient DBMS. It's not some DSL you'd just cook up anytime you need it. Your hex / photoshop example is about the farthest thing from syntactic sugar imaginable - "syntactic sugar" imples a trivial, usually purely lexical transformation between two ways of expressing something (like the SQL example above).