Xerox had xfst, which replaced regular expressions by regular _relations_, and offered named sub-expressions, which solved the regex "write only" problem.

Xerox' original XRCE (Research Centre Europe) pages are gone, but other sites offer a glimpse, and FOMA is an open source implementation of the same language:

[1] https://sites.google.com/a/utcompling.com/icl-f11/home/xfst-...

[2] https://dsacl3-2018.github.io/xfst-demo/