IMHO, it's a horrible hack that is just broken. It's obscure and we need to rewrite it because it has a bad structure. ^X^Cquit^[ESC][ESC]^C
I've been seeing a lot of Perl jokes lately and as far as legacy code I haven't had to edit anything written in that in 25 or so years. For those that haven't used it, getting form variables and rudimentary things like that were like equivalent to regular expressions, everything had some obscure expression you had to look up or copy paste.