[qlkzy]

I think that regular expressions have a good syntax for most typical (small) uses of regular expressions. Maybe the choice of special characters isn't ideal, and it might be nice to have 'English' versions of more special characters (similar to e.g. [[:digit:]] in POSIX), but for small regexes the (mostly) one-to-one mapping between characters in the pattern and characters in the string is a very nice and intuitive syntax.

I think the real problem is that we lack (or don't learn) good tools to bridge the gap between regular expressions and 'custom parser'. We're reluctant to refactor from '1 line of just-starting-to-be-horrible regex' to tens or hundreds of lines (depending on language and libraries) to do it 'properly', and so we end up stretching regular expressions beyond the point where they make life easier.

Perl has Parse::RecDescent (and probably several others), which is pretty close to the right thing, and clearly it's very doable in a lot of languages - anyone got any suggestions in other languages?