This SRE (Scheme Reg. Ex.) proposal looks interesting. It's dated '98 and I didn't find any info about an implementation so perhaps it's not interesting in practice, or maybe no one has just done it yet. It's a superset of regular expressions with an s-expr syntax that allows for neat things, such as (- alpha ("aeiouAEIOU")) to match vowels.
Yeah, I saw that, too. I agree it looks cool, but I'm a little skeptical because it's so much less concise than standard regular expressions. Maybe this is really a good thing, I dunno.
The scsh sres really are wonderful, much easier to use than regular regular expressions, (especially compared to xemacs which I constantly make mistakes with) and you don't have to deal with complex string quoting to use them.
If I were Paul, I would design a similar API for regular expressions.
