Indeed so. While many languages have been content to treat ML as a
special case of raw, there's something somewhat odd and forced about
lumping them together. Of course, splitting has its overheads too --
but I think there is a path here to identifying the right dimensions of
parameterization where we can have one feature, simply parameterized.
The first dimension here is what to do about line spanning; the
thin-vs-fat delimiter seems a good enough way to split that out, but
there is still lots to talk about regarding accidental indentation and
terminator normalization (1A) -- before we even get to raw-ness (2).
But so far, teasing out ML as its own axis (which isn't fully finished)
looks promising, and I like that these string literals are recognized as
merely another flavor of the same basic feature. Happy so far.
On 4/5/2019 2:12 PM, Alex Buckley wrote:
As someone who was nervous about how raw string literals effectively
sidelined Unicode, I'm pleased that \uXXXX escapes are back. It's also
great that the traditional escape sequence \" will be interpreted as a
single " like it would be in a traditional string literal. Because, as
we all know, the code above started life as this painful noisy code:
String result = "public class Main {\n" +
" public static void main(String... args) {\n" +
" System.out.println(\"Hello World!\");\n" +
" }\n" +
"}\n";
Now a developer can move forward in steps: today remove all the
end-of-line cruft involving \n and + that multi-line strings do for
free, and don't worry about mid-line escape sequences such as \" --
convert them to " tomorrow, or next week, or not at all, your choice.
Alex
