> just the syntax becomes unreadable rather quickly. I’m sure you could build a nicer regular-expression syntax in Haskell.

Of course regular expressions are really more of a category of expressions, and the traditional kleene star notation is only one of many options; regular expressions do not somehow inherently need to use that specific syntax.

Pomsky and VerbalExpressions are just some examples of alternative syntaxes for regex. Apparently there is even a port of VerbalExpressions for Haskell:

https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/HaskellVerbalExpression...