everybody is learning regex, it's part of any standard curriculum, it's in everyday use on unix platforms, rigid implementation without variables or recursion i

everybody is learning regex, it's part of any standard curriculum, it's in everyday use on unix platforms, rigid implementation without variables or recursion is a regular automaton has a firm place in the computational hierarchy and the benefit of predictable runtime, the markup is just syntactic sugar, and you can of course embed regex in any more powerful programming language that allows variables, like awk, perl, etc. Perl, hardly anyone wants to learn anymore, if that's what you mean.