Ah, the leaning toothpick syndrome. At least the most common special characters, such as "(", ")", "|", "[", "]", "^", and "$", don't need backslashes so it's not as bad as some other well known examples. If anything should be done about it I think it could just as well be to introduce a regexp syntax that don't use backslashes for quoting.
There was a discussion about other string syntaxes not long ago on the Pike list; search for the subject "multi line strings".
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-09-21 13:15: Subject: wish: string with other quoting then \
If I could wish, I think I'd wish for an alternative string syntax in Pike, that doesn't use \ to quote. It's so hairy writing advanced regexps if you have to quote the . :)
Is it a bad idea? It should be quote possible to do, if we could spare some syntax for it (and maybe figure out another quote character).
/ Mirar