Regular expressions are their own language. The fact that we encode a DSL as a string is the problem for tools, and not the fact that strings are hard to handl

Regular expressions are their own language. The fact that we encode a DSL as a string is the problem for tools, and not the fact that strings are hard to handle. If you offer a syntax extension other than strings to indicate the DSL coming next, and then have syntax highlighting for that DSL, then it would be fine.