With open source, I am `forced' to figure out how to do things on my own without canned functions. I could be wrong, not having looked at Mathematica for twenty

With open source, I am `forced' to figure out how to do things on my own without canned functions. I could be wrong, not having looked at Mathematica for twenty years, but I believe my pattern searching among hundreds of millions of long string filtered generated expressions and their respective digit expansions, requires regular expression processing which takes a lot of practice before it becomes easy but likely necessary, as I don't see how this regular expression processing could be eliminated. Perl is deservedly famous for intrinsically integrating its regex engine, so with other's reference material to grow with, eg, all the good bioinformatics books and perl modules -CPAN open source- everything moving ahead directly and often wonderfully, exploring many novel threads derived off whatever I'm primarily currently focused on.