We have a first-class, powerful, and versatile solution for parsing and pattern-matching in native Swift. That’s a separate proposal (actually multiple proposals, some of which have already been pitched).
We still want to have regexes, because:
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programs need to be able to leverage user-specified parsers and pattern matchers, not only those fixed in their source code, and those need to support a string representation. For the purposes of interoperability with existing tools, it is advantageous for regexes to be one such representation.
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they are the lingua franca of such programs today, and that familiarity confers substantial advantages.
That’s this proposal.