A CoffeeScript for RegExps?

A Model RegExp.coffee

# Sample RegEx with CoffeeScript comments 
# from http://www.elijahmanor.com/regular-expressions-in-coffeescript-are-awesome/

emailPattern = /// ^ # begin of line
   ([\w.-]+)         # one or more letters, numbers, _ . or -
   @                 # followed by an @ sign
   ([\w.-]+)         # then one or more letters, numbers, _ . or -
   \.                # followed by a period
   ([a-zA-Z.]{2,6})  # followed by 2 to 6 letters or periods
   $ ///i            # end of line and ignore case

Possible Future State.rb

# The example translated

emailPattern = Pattern( line_start().
                        match([:letters, :numbers, '_', '.', '-'], options => {limit: '1+'}).
                        match('@').
                        match([:letters, :numbers, '_', '.', '-'], options => {limit: '1+'}).
                        match('.').
                        match([:letters, '.'], options => {limit: '2-6'}).
                        line_end().
                        case_insensitive()
                      )

What Else Is Out There.md

What else is out there?

Clojure seems to have some nice ideas

re2

searching without regex pain using Ack or ag

some ideas here

One more: https://github.com/jimweirich/re

Personally I haven't bothered with anything like that before, regexps aren't used that often... Usually there's just one or two in an app that are longer than several characters and they're usually email/username validations that you write once and never change again.