Perl and regexps are too much verbose (!)

A colleague asked me a quick Perl way to check if a string contains only a predefined set of chars excluding a few ones.
Easy pal!
Regexp to the rescue!

Then I was asked for a way that did no use a regular expression, because "you know, regular expression can be somehow verbose".
Gosh!
My answer was simply "you don't use regexps a lot!".

I don't believe I have to explain to any (Perl) programmer that regexps have been designed to express in short a whole set of choices,
more in general an alphabet (in the most wider concept).

But let's move on, and after showing a quick and dirty one liner such as:

perl -E 'say "Wrong $_" unless ( /^[0-9]+$/ ); ' -F

I got another strange sentence as "yeah, but I don't like Perl too much, it is somehow verbose as a language".
And again, my answer was: "you don't use it regularly!".

It is clear Perl was seen in the wrong way, since both the language as well as regular expressions can be really short, as well as
a one liner…
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