Your solution is still wrong as proposed:
/^[:alpha:][[:alpha:]\d-]*\z/
The first mistake is that [:alpha:], by itself isn't a character class. It won't compile as you've written it. It needs to be presented like this:
[[:alpha:]]
^_________^______Note the outer set of brackets.
The next problem is that the OP stated that the first character cannot be a hyphen character, but he didn't exclude numeric digits. Your solution will fail if the first character is a numeric digit.
Also, '^' matches at the beginning of a "line". That probably isn't an issue for this particular regexp, but it is worth noting that '^' is different from '\A', which matches at the beginning of a string.
If you really despise the /x modifier, and prefer to avoid [:digit:] for whatever reason (maybe less typing?), you could rewrite my original solution like this:
m/\A[[:alpha:]\d][[:alpha:]\d-]*\z/
But I think the version with the /x modifier is easier to read since it keeps individual anchors together, and everything else separate.
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