I like using POSIX character sets when they're applicable because they will "work" nicely with the locale and utf8 pragmas, and Unicode. When you see [a-zA-Z] in code, you're looking at code that probably won't play nice with locales. A good way to accommodate locales is POSIX character classes. So re-written with that in mind, you have this:
print "Match!\n" if $string =~ m/([[:alpha:]])\1/; # Probably good.
...instead of the possibly problematic:
print "Match!\n" if $string =~ m/([a-zA-Z])\1/; # Maybe bad!
