[andrewflnr]

I'm using the term "quoting" in the general sense of a marker that some sequence of symbols is being used as symbols, rather than for their semantic values.

My perspective on regular expressions in one of a student who was not two weeks ago introduced to the formal version of REs. In this formalism, there are basically strings and operators on these strings. We don't usually use quotes, but only because you can usually infer from context which bits are strings and which are one of the small set of operators. But when we need to match numbers with possible "+"es (the alternation operator) in front of them, out come the quotes.

In a typical programming language, we don't have the luxury of expecting the interpreter to infer things like that from context. Further, it's rather common to try to match things that would otherwise be used as metacharacters. This is exactly why quoting, in the general sense, was invented, so we can tell what's the program and what's the input.

Granted, most of my RE experience is in Python, where everything is just jammed in a string. There it's obvious that metacharacters and escapes are just a worse-is-better substitute for quasiquoting. Maybe it's different in Perl, but I'm skeptical. Strings matching themselves is cool. The problem is that it's cool enough to prevent you from realizing when you've taken the metaphor too far.