sorry I didn't know that Philip Hazel wrote PCRE ... and I certainly credit the initiative to release Perl Compatible Regular Expressions from the grip of perl

my main point is that PCRE was based on perl regexes and that these were designed by Larry Wall and so he had some experience when it came to the strengths and weaknesses of of perl RE when it came to designing the Raku RE syntax (ie. the language formerly known as Perl 6)