Parsing

Parsing is the process of analyzing an input sequence to determine the structure of statements according to the rules for a language.

In other words, we're looking for patterns in the input sequence that make sense according to the language.

In Perl 5, regular expressions have been the common (and powerful) way for recognizing patterns in strings.

Perl 6 extends the capabilities of regular expressions to make them more useful for building language parsers.

In Perl 6, we call these pattern-matching things "regex".