Well, I linked to Rubular, but that only works for proper regular expressions, which you can do by making the substitutions yourself and piecing things together, but I'm working on a script to generate this. Keep in mind that \+
doesn't work in Ruby, so you'd need to number these by the groups they refer to in order of appearance.
Edit: I will never trust a backslash again. Anyway, here's what you do to try using this:
Because this is a multi-step process, I strongly recommend figuring out your expression in parts before putting them together, to make sure they work properly. Also note that to enter spaces as characters to test, you need to put a backslash before them, or put them in a []
group.
That is all.
It's a little more subtle than RPN. For example, there is a word that changes the mode of interpretation to quotation until a certain end word, sort of like bracketing. Until I get into that, if you have programming experience, I recommend looking into [Forth](/r/Forth) dialects, for example Factor.
I don't really think the mental load would be an issue, given how complex and varied sentence structure in natural languages can be, even within a single language (for example English; this is all one sentence (in a sense), and breaking down how the meaning emerges as you move through it is highly nontrivial).