There is! I do! It's Parsing Expression Grammars! There's a reason Rakudo adopted them in its quest to out-Perl Perl (5). Regex is fine as an adequately-power

There is! I do! It's Parsing Expression Grammars! There's a reason Rakudo adopted them in its quest to out-Perl Perl (5). Regex is fine as an adequately-powerful shorthand for command-line munging and text editors, where the terseness is useful. It turns on you as soon as you want to use it in a programming language... which is where Perl comes in.