This is not an original idea of mine.
...we also have thought proper to arrange in order what has been handed down by former writers, and to add thereto our own discoveries: a task from which much advantage will result to those who shall hereafter devote themselves to the study...
-- Hero of Alexandria, Pneumatics, 2nd ed.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Rx-Notation.html
https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/papers/sre.txt
https://github.com/jwiegley/emacs-release/blob/master/lisp/obsolete/sregex.el
https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PythonVerbalExpressions
https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/implementation
https://github.com/francisrstokes/super-expressive
https://johnfraney.ca/blog/human-readable-regular-expressions/
https://github.com/johnfraney/blog-examples/tree/master/human-readable-regular-expressions-python