Karl Fogel at
Whenever I have a complex, hard-to-articulate thought, I look to see if @Steve_Yegge already said it. Latest: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem
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I think he's slightly wrong with the XPath claim though. Years and year ago Russ Cox came out with a paper on what he called Structural Regular Expressions, which were able to go beyond line by line while retaining most of the good features that regexes have. Least I think it'd be able to handle this: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf