What's the problem using regexps for searching stuff? It's even quite common for lexing, it just gets ugly if try to parse stuff with it (brace matching etc.).

What's the problem using regexps for searching stuff? It's even quite common for lexing, it just gets ugly if try to parse stuff with it (brace matching etc.). (And IIRC, the quote originated from a piece of code where jwz actually did use regexps quite a lot, if just to get enough performance out of elisp)