This was not a nitpicking, in the first place. Messages on forums are public domain and people tend to memoize slogans, therefore I felt kinda obliged to help not so experienced devs reading this not to memoize the plain wrong statement.

The true value of sigils is not that they change a string into some data because therefore as you said it could be replaced with a “normal” parse-like function.

Why is that? The sigil is the syntactic sugar for a function call under the hood. One might use Kernel.sigil_r("0-9", []) everywhere instead of ~r/0-9/ and literally nothing would have changed for them.

This can’t be replaced with a “regular” strings and any functions unless some library would claim that they reserve some specific naming.

Sure it can.

This only adds more work for the developers.of LSP and other tools […]

What “this”? The parser is a rather dumb thing, it pays no dime to whether it should highlight the string inside some fancy brackets or inside sigil_r(" and the closing ".

You can hash it out here, but let’s please keep that convo on topic!