[feanaro]

I see two novel aspects of this language:

1. the ability to easily break patterns into named subpatterns which can be referenced later on

2. the `@` operator which gives you the ability to talk about things inside these subpatterns

These seem like worthwhile additions which would make regex more manageable. I don't see any reason why the whole of regex would need to be abandoned for some completely new, potentially proprietary technology, though.

It also reminds me of parser combinators (in the form they are popular in Haskell, for instance).

[al2o3cr]

The Oniguruma engine has had named, callable subpatterns for a while:

https://github.com/kkos/oniguruma/blob/master/doc/RE#L400

Supported (via Oniguruma) in Ruby 2.0.0+, dunno about other languages.