Lua patterns

["Soni L." <fakedme@...>]

Lua patterns are too complex.

^[^()]?([a-z]-$.*)$

^ was repeated twice, with 2 different meanings
$ was repeated twice, again with 2 different meanings
[] was repeated twice, although with the same meaning
( was repeated twice, with 2 different meanings
- was repeated twice, with 2 different meanings

+ - * and ? can be simplified to + - and ? (PCRE has + * +? *? ? which 
can also be simplified to + - and ?, and technically ? is not needed)

In my opinion, that's a lot of (unnecessary) special-casing. Is there 
any way Lua could eliminate all of that?

(I've been working on a Lua-pattern-like matcher called "ClEx"[1] which 
aims to make it simple enough to parse (you can even parse it 
iteratively!) but powerful enough to be comparable to regex - to the 
point where you can write any regex with ClEx, but you can't write any 
ClEx with regex)

[1] https://gist.github.com/SoniEx2/36d2ccf875ea025c8fe5

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