Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:21:34 -0700, Douglas Alan wrote:
On Aug 12, 5:32 am, Steven D'Aprano
<ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
That problem basically boils down to a deep-seated philosophical
disagreement over which philosophy a language should follow in regard
to backslash escapes:
"Anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden"
versus
"Anything not explicitly forbidden is permitted"
No, it doesn't. It boils down to whether a language should:
(1) Try it's best to detect errors as early as possible, especially when
the cost of doing so is low.
You are making an unjustified assumption: \y is not an error. It is only
an error if you think that anything not explicitly permitted is forbidden.
While I'm amused that you've made my own point for me, I'm less amused
that you seem to be totally incapable of seeing past your parochial
language assumptions, even when those assumptions are explicitly pointed
out to you. Am I wasting my time engaging you in discussion?
There's a lot more I could say, but time is short, so let me just
summarise:
I disagree with nearly everything you say in this post. I think that a
few points you make have some validity, but the vast majority are based
on a superficial and confused understanding of language design
principles. (I won't justify that claim now, perhaps later, time
permitting.) Nevertheless, I think that your ultimate wish -- for \y etc
to be considered an error -- is a reasonable design choice, given your
assumptions. But it's not the only reasonable design choice, and Bash has
made a different choice, and Python has made yet a third reasonable
choice, and Pascal made yet a fourth reasonable choice.
IHMO, it would've been simpler in the long run to say that backslash
followed by one of [0-9A-Za-z] is an escape sequence, backslash followed
by newline is ignored, and backslash followed by anything else is that
something. That way there would be a way to introduce additional escape
sequences without breaking existing code.
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