I have also wanted something like that on several occasions. ideally, I'd like something like python where.
foo = """ hello this is preformatted text. """
will be the same as foo = "hello this is\npreformatted text.\n"
I wouldn't want something like that in a language.
It's very convenient, yes, but I'm uneasy at the prospect of an editor cutting off trailing blanks. I shudder at the prospect of an editor reinterpreting leading blanks as tabs or vice versa - the text will be interpreted differently depending on whether it's displayed in an editor, on a terminal, or in the dialog box of a GUI.
This all doesn't matter much when all that one wants is a simple Usage: message in response to a --help option. But it would be hellishly difficult to make sure that every programmer understands the ramifications of using multiline string literals.
Personally, I'd prefer having autoconcatenated strings like this:
multilineLiteral = "\n"
"\tline1\n"
"\tline2"
making all the representation decisions explicit.
To edit that thing, I'd like a macro that took the autoconcatenated string literal at the current cursor position, created a temporary buffer with the parsed string, let the user edit it, and moved the unparsed results of that edit back into the original source code.
Regards, Jo
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