JEP Syntax Policy

One of the qualities I enjoy of JMESPath is its syntactic simplicity.
I have seen a number of proposals to introduce new syntax for various purposes that has me concerned.
One example is adding a regex operator.
I would like to propose that operators and syntax be reserved for transforming, referencing, and subscripting data structures and not data values. All value specific operations should be implemented as functions. The exception to this would be arithmetic operators intended to operate on values.
This means all string operations other than those that could be reasonably described by an arithmetic operator should be implemented as a function.

Having complex value operations described as functions makes JMESPaths more readable.