&gt; Ruby is less like Perl 6 regex-wise due to the smart match (among many other things).<p>In both Perl 5 and Perl 6, smart match (`~~`) with a regex on the right hand side is just an alternate spelling (Perl 5) or correct spelling (Perl 6) for `=~`. It&#x27;s a tiny, trivial difference.<p>But a Perl 6 &quot;regex&quot; can be an arbitrary full blown parser or compiler. And it assumes character=grapheme. In these two regards, as in several others, Perl 6 is quite unlike Perl 5 and other langs that adopted Perl 5 regexes and&#x2F;or that adopted Unicode codepoints (or worse) rather than graphemes as their fundamental &quot;character&quot; unit.