True, although Plan9 pushed that part of the Unix philosophy even further, towards where it arguably handles some of those more general cases as well, with "structural regexes" that work on things other than collections of lines: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/
Isn't the general consensus that regexes are hard to maintain and debug? I'm not sure that "structural regexes" are solving the right problem.
I think maybe we're not shooting at the same baskets though (basketball reference, apologies if you're not from US); I'm trying to write software applications, not shell scripts.
