Here's a typical example of the pain of Java language evolution. As an ex-Perl developer and frequent user of Ruby and Python I am accustomed to being able to w

Here's a typical example of the pain of Java language evolution. As an ex-Perl developer and frequent user of Ruby and Python I am accustomed to being able to write a regex without having to escape metacharacters such as \d (digit) and \w (word character) as is necessary in Java where regular expressions are merely strings fed into the Pattern.compile() method. So imagine my elation when I discovered that raw string literals were being previewed in Java 13. Then imagine my horror when I discovered that regex metacharacters somehow missed the party and STILL had to be escaped inside raw string literals. WTF!?