Part of it may be that "pee cee are eey" (or less commonly, "picker", "picker eey", etc.) doesn't really sound as nice as "regex". Also, PCRE does stand for "

Part of it may be that "pee cee are eey" (or less commonly, "picker", "picker eey", etc.) doesn't really sound as nice as "regex". Also, PCRE does stand for "Perl Compatible Regular Expression".