Why does VIM have its own regex syntax?

Question

Why do you have to make your regex "very magic" so that you don't have to escape your capture quotes? And if you set your environment to very magic, you are non-standard and may have compliance issues. I am just wondering why vim uses a different regex syntax than say, perl?

Answer 1

Most vi (and therefore vim) features were derived from ed. vi and ed both predate perl by at least a decade or two. A better question might be "why doesn't Perl use the same regex syntax as vi?".

Of course, one could also argue that the kinds of regular expressions that one would wish to write inside a text editor to perform common tasks are probably rather different to those you might wish to write inside a programming language.