You're right. My mistake. I like automata and I think regexes are good for some things, but I definitely agree about the crappy syntax. When working in CL, I l

You're right. My mistake. I like automata and I think regexes are good for some things, but I definitely agree about the crappy syntax. When working in CL, I loved Edi Weitz' CLPPCRE package which allowed you to specify regexes using either the traditional broken string form or an s-exp syntax. Much cleaner.