Robert Elz wrote, on 04 Apr 2022:
>
> | Personally I don't see that there is a problem with the current wording.
>
> It is almost OK, and if you consider the readers must be able to
> interpret the words in a rational, obvious, way, would be.
>
> The problem is that an escape character cannot be escaped, if it is,
> it isn't an escape character (so there is a contradiction).
I looked at other uses of "escape character" and found this in XCU 2.2.3:
... the <backslash> shall retain its special meaning as an
escape character (see Section 2.2.1) only when ...
which fits with your way of looking at it, so it would make sense to
change the proposed text in bug 1546 for consistency with the above.
> ps: I'm also not greatly in favour of writing the backslash character as
> a C character constant, rather than just as a character (as in a sh quoted
> string for example) as '\'. Since there will always people who will object
> to either of those, I wouldn't give the character's glyph form at all, but
> rather refer to XBD 6.1 where it is presented without the quotes, and so
> there's no problem. So "<backslash> ([xref XBD 6.1])".
I can see there are more uses of <backslash> in the standard without the
glyph that with, so I'm happy to drop the glyph. I don't see a need for
an xref to XBD 6.1, as the character-name-in-angle-brackets convention is
used all over the place without such references.
A minimal fix to the current proposed text would be something like this:
An escape sequence is defined as the escape character (a <backslash>
that is neither in a bracket expression nor itself escaped), followed
by any single character.
or it could be split into two sentences along the lines of your original
suggestion:
An escape sequence is defined as the escape character followed
by any single character. The escape character is a <backslash>
that is neither in a bracket expression nor itself escaped.
--
Geoff Clare <g.cl...@opengroup.org>
The Open Group, Apex Plaza, Forbury Road, Reading, RG1 1AX, England
