regular expressions from hell

I've noticed there are no less then 10^10 regex implementations.
Is there a standard?  Does ANSI have a regexp standard, or is there
a regex standard in the ANSI SQL spec?  What do we use?

Personally, I'm a perl guy, so everytime I have to bend my brain to
some other regex syntax, I get a headache.  As part of my perl PL
package, perl regexps will be included as a set of operators.

Is there interest in the release of perl-style regexp operators for
postgres before the PL is completed?  Note that this requires the
entire perl library to be loaded when the operator is used (possibly
expensive).  But, if you have a shared perl library, this only has to
happen once.