I can't remember the names but I've seen at least two alternative syntaxes recently that are a lot more readable. At least one of them fixed the issue of regex mixing up control in-band with data. So your example would be something like
I believe they mean the operators and operands are all mixed up, eg in `ab`, and this makes it so you have to escape all sorts of characters, but if you split it into `"a" "b"` then the separation is clear
I mean it isn't clear whether a character is a control character (* + ? [ ] - etc) or a literal character because they're all mixed up. The rules about which is which are too complex, extensive and varying.
If you use syntax like "a"* "b" then it's really obvious - the stuff in quotes is literal text, everything else is control.
