S-expressions which make me think of Lisp and functional programming... which I mention because regular expressions as means for defining a pattern against whic

S-expressions which make me think of Lisp and functional programming... which I mention because regular expressions as means for defining a pattern against which to find matches has a functional programming feel to it. Perhaps something like Linq in .NET or Map() in JavaScript would work as you're more or less converting the text in a string/document to an array and then running a "does it match or not" function on it and returning the position when there's a match. So something which a functional programming feel makes sense.