in reply to Multidimensional regular expressions
Earlier I mused that with Perl 6 "patterns", the uniformity between grammar rules and package subs could be even more unified, by allowing any subs to "fail" and "backtrack". Then you have a forward-chaining logic language like Prolog.
You could, I beleive, code functions for your primitives that indeed access data in different parts of a data structure and return pass/fail, but then string them together in a Rule to provide for the backtracking.
Second, consider expanding out any non-cyclic data structure into a long string, like what Dumper does. Armed with regex tools that include Ballanced Parens etc., this can be parsed with grammer rules, right? So where's the other dimentions, exactly?
In Section
Meditations