My apologies, I left out one additional known limitation: raw string
literals that start or end with tick. There are numerous workarounds,
none of which are beautiful, such as:
String s = `` `foo` ``.trim();
String s = TICK + `foo` + TICK;
## Anomalies and puzzlers
While the proposed scheme is lexically very simple, it does have some
at least one surprising consequence, as well as at least one restriction:
- The empty string cannot be represented by a raw string literal
(because two consecutive ticks will be interpreted as a double-tick
delimiter, not a starting and ending delimiter);
- String containing line delimiters other than \n cannot be
represented directly by a raw string literal.
The latter anomaly is true for any scheme that is free of embedding
anomalies (escaping) and that normalizes newlines. If we chose to not
normalize newlines, we'd arguably have a worse anomaly, which is that
the carriage control of a raw string depends on the platform you
compiled it on.
The empty-string anomaly is scary at first, but, in my opinion, is
much less of a concern than the initial surprise makes it appear.
Once you learn it, you won't forget it -- and IDEs and compilers will
provide feedback that help you learn it. It is also easily avoided:
use traditional string literals unless you have a specific need for
raw-ness. There already is a perfectly valid way to denote the empty
string.
