John Chambers wrote:
>This has been thrashed out for many programming languages
>over the past several decades. It turns out there's only
>one rule that will actually be implemented the same by all
>programmers, and it's also the only rule that users will
>all understand the same way. This is that the continuation
>('\' in abc as in many programming languages) just means to
>join the current line to the next line.
I agree.
>If we attempt to have the continuation mechanism skip
>lines, we make life very difficult for all of us, because
>there is no real hope that all programmers will implement
>this skipping the same way.
>
>We should classify the old scheme(s) as a minor mistake,
>and correct it in the official standard. Then it will
>finally be clear how programs should implement it, and
>programs that skip lines to find the continuation will
>simply be buggy. But it's an easy bug to fix.
>
>(And we'll still have the even more minor problem caused by
>the fact that some programmers will replace the '\' with a
>space, while others will delete it plus the newline,
>causing the two lines to be joined without a separator.
>This is a problem that still plagues several programming
>languages. It's made worse by the fact that there's no
>logical solution; both ways work equally well. Quandaries
>like this are almost impossible for a group of humans to
>ever solve. ;-)
Er, why would you want to put a space in place of the backslash?
Joining the two lines without a separator seems the logical
thing to do (or at least I can't immediately think of a situation
where adding a space would make sense).
Phil Taylor
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