> On Wed, 14 Jun 2017, G?bor Cs?rdi wrote: > > > I like the idea of string literals, but the C/C++ way clearly does not > > work. The Python/Julia way might, i.e.: > > > > """this is a > > multi-line > > lineral""" > > luke-tier...@uiowa.edu:
> This does look like a promising option; some more careful checking > would be needed to make sure there aren't cases where currently > working code would be broken. I don't see how this proposal solves any problem of interest. String literals can already be as long as you like. The problem is that they will get wrapped around in an editor (or not all be visible), destroying the nice formatting of your program. With the proposed extension, you can write long string literals with short lines only if they were long only because they consisted of multiple lines. Getting a string literal that's 79 characters long with no newlines (a perfectly good error message, for example) to fit in your 80-character-wide editing window would still be impossible. Furthermore, these Python-style literals have to have their second and later lines start at the left edge, destroying the indentation of your program (supposing you actually wanted to use one). In contrast, C-style concatenation (by the parser) of consecutive string literals works just fine for what you'd want to do in a program. The only thing they wouldn't do that the Python-style literals would do is allow you to put big blocks of literal text in your program, without having to put quotes around each line. But shouldn't such text really be stored in a separate file that gets read, rather than in the program source? Radford Neal ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel