Almost any syntax is only a small matter of programming to implement in the preprocessor. What concerns me is more all the other tools that has to understand it too, as I talked about in the last discussion about this. It's far from easy to get into Emacs and XEmacs, for example.
There's also the issue that Peter Lundqvist mentioned: The added complexity of another string syntax is a drawback in itself when it comes to learning curve. Is it really sufficiently useful to outweigh that?
I'd say that at least 5% of all string literals would have to benefit from a new syntax to motivate its existence. I only missed something like it about ten or twenty times in all the years I've used Pike. So from my point of view the drawbacks outweigh the benefits with a factor of thousand at least. But it all depends on how you typically use the language, of course. Someone that writes complicated regexps or pastes in multiline xml snippets all day long will certainly have a different perspective.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-09-21 18:23: Subject: Re: wish: string with other quoting then \
#` is nice. But is there any better character that is even less common? Or, I think I'd like the final to be a tupel too, since that's easier to avoid.
How about #`...`#? But it kind of looks ugly... I guess [[...]] is out of the question?
For the multiline, I think I'd like a nice keyword, like #string. For instance #multiline,
string s2 = #multiline __DELIM ... __DELIM;
(note the semicolon; it must be there to complete the sentence.)
How easy is that to implement in the parser?
/ Mirar