Re: [fpc-pascal] Feature "Multiline strings" added

[Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2025, Pierre Muller via fpc-pascal wrote:

Le 28/07/2025 à 10:07, Michalis Kamburelis via fpc-pascal a écrit :

Michael Van Canneyt wrote:

Personally, I prefer the backtick solution.
The triple quote is slow, it requires postprocessing the string.
The backtick solution needs only one pass.

<rant>
I positively HATE it when people start treating whitespace as
significant. No YAML or Python for me on that account alone.
The triple quote solution (presumably Python inspired)
is a totally braindead and retarded solution as far as I am concerned.
</rant>

You can guess from that little rant that I myself will certainly not
remove or even deprecate the backtick version.

If having one soluton for all is the norm, we need to remove a lot more

things from FPC that Delphi did differently than we do. We don't do that

either.

Compatibility, yes. But that should not prevent us from doing things our

own

way from time to time.

The solution is simple:
if you don't like the backticks, don't use them.

I can see how this can get into a heated discussion (hopefully it will
not!) :) You have the last word when it comes to FPC decisions,
obviously. Still, let me try to present the case for "deprecate
backticks" again.

The problem with your solution """if you don't like the backticks,
don't use them.""" -> is that it means we have 2 ways to achieve the
same thing in the Pascal language, to the end of time, and users
*will* get confused about them and we have 2x more work to explain it.
Things like indentation, crlf/native/etc., what happens with last line
-> they have now 2 different behaviors, and people who work with
various Pascal code (Pas2js, FPC, Delphi) will need to grok them both
and remember which {$xxx} affects which. This makes things harder --
to document, to teach, and to not confuse ourselves when reading alien
code.

I think that a possible solution would be to allow to restrict the mode switch to allow

only triple-quote or only backquote delimiter.

The idea is simply to add:
{$modeswitch multilinestrings triplequote}
and
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}



It is then probably legitimate to also add:
{$modeswitch multilinestrings all}
{$modeswitch multilinestrings none}

Delphi mode can then use
{$modeswitch multilinestrings triplequote}

by default, which means that back-quote will still be refused by the compiler,

unless explicit
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}
or
{$modeswitch multilinestrings all}

is used.

pas2js code using back-quote would then need an explicit
{$ifdef FPC}
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}
{$endif FPC}
to get the compiler to accept that syntax...

Michael, would that be OK for the Pas2js part?

For me this is OK.

Thinking about it: As far as I know, modeswitches do not accept an argument,
they are simple booleans ?

Instead we could have a {$MULTILINESTRINGSTYLE NNN} directive and a -Su<type> or 
-Sl<type>
command line switch, with the delphi mode forcing the 'triplequote' style.

Michael.
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist  -  fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal