I’ve started a new Twitter account @PerlRegex for Perl regular expressions. My original account, @RegexTip, is for regular expressions in general and doesn’t go into much detail regarding any particular implementation. @PerlRegex goes into the specifics of regular expressions in Perl.
Why specifically Perl regular expressions? Because Perl has the most powerful support for regular expressions (strictly speaking, “pattern matching.”) Other languages offer “Perl compatible” regular expressions, though the degree of compatibility varies and is always less than complete.
I imagine more people have ruled England than have mastered the whole of the Perl language. But it’s possible to use Perl for regular expression processing without learning too much of the wider language.
Update: I’ve stopped posting to this account. Here’s a list of my current accounts.
I think you should actually specify if it refers only to Perl 5 regular expressions, as Perl 6 regular expressions are quite a bit different.
To really see a good example of the differences look at a JSON parser in Perl 5 vs a much easer to read one in Perl 6.
The Perl 6 version also has an actions class that transforms it into a Perl 6 data structure, rather than combining that into the regex the way the Perl 5 one does. ( doing it this way allows someone to write actions classes for some other purpose, but still use the same grammar )
I also like how the Perl 6 JSON serializer looks.