Re: multi-line Strings
On 12/10/2012 6:04 PM, Eric Sosman wrote:
On 12/10/2012 4:52 PM, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
On 12/10/2012 4:22 PM, Eric Sosman wrote:
On 12/10/2012 3:08 PM, Arne Vajh?j wrote:
[...]
PS: And for those that do not know C#, then C# has "" strings
with \ as escape like Java, but also has @"" string where
\ is not an escape and where line change are allowed.
As one of "those," and curious: Can a @"" string have an
embedded " character?
Yes.
An " inside @"" is encoded as "".
Aha! Another FORTRAN legacy! As of FORTRAN IV you could
write 'I''M HERE' instead of 8HI'M HERE, which most people
considered a great advance -- in the late 1960's.
Doubling is also used in various Pascal, Basic, SQL.
My guess is that doubling is more common than escaping
in non-C-family languages.
My point, of course, is that there's still an escape mechanism
at work. It's a different mechanism, yes, but it still has the
What You See Ain't What You Get problem this thread has been
complaining about. And here's a funny thing about inventing an
escape mechanism: Even if the special character sequences were
surpassingly uninteresting and spectacularly rare before being
adopted as escapes, their very adoption makes them suddenly
interesting and much more common. You'll find yourself wanting
to write a regex that looks for "" inside a @"..." string, and
you'll get something like
@"@""([^""]*""""")*[^""]*"""
... leaving you pretty much where you started, just with a new
suit of clothes on the Emperor.
The doubling mechanism is used only for the string encloser character,
while true escape is used for many other characters as well.
Sp the doubling mechanism should result in fewer problems than
true escape.
Furthermore the suggestion was not to replace the current mechanism
but to supplement it. Which means that one can still pick the current
form if one think that it is more readable for some cases.
Also, we still need to produce
"\u0281 is the IPA voiced uvular fricative"
... on input systems that cannot generate the IPA voiced uvular
fricative all by themselves.
CHAR(0x0281) // 'is the IPA voiced uvular fricative'
or similar work in other languages.
Arne