On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 3:25 AM, Michael Montague <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

Why are there not text versions of the repeating patterns? Sequencing is seq or :. Should there be zero-or-once for ? and so on.

Historical reasons. I'm presuming the original motivation

for seq was because : didn't exist in existing PCRE notation,

whereas *, +, ? etc. are already familiar.

I see no reason not to add readable variants of these though.

Alex