Perl Text Patterns for Search and Replace The Perl programming language, originally designed for text-processing only, is the main cause for the popularity that regular expressions enjoy nowadays. Mainly because Perl's regex engine introduced many new powerful features, and because regexes are part of the Perl syntax, and not an add-on library as with most other languages. with causedesignedlanguagemainoriginallyperlprogrammingtext-processingby 2 users