[hyperupcall]

I agree that it would be nice to get native syntax highlighting for strings, especially for languages where regular expressions are not a first class feature

However, I would realllyyy not want to have a more verbose regex dialect. For me at least, it would make recognizing common regex patterns a lot harder since they won't be succinct. It would also be yet _another_ regex variety that I would have to remember.

For me, Perl's DEFINE feature and 'x' switch are definitely close enough[1] to variables and comments. Pardon, I don't remember what they are officially called. What we really need is for more non PCRE engines to implement these features

[1]: https://regex101.com/r/z5pGvZ/6