On Sep 19, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Masklinn <maskl...@masklinn.net> wrote:
> On 2013-09-19, at 22:36 , Kevin Ballard wrote:
>>
>> I welcome any comments, criticisms, or suggestions.
>
> * C# also has rawstrings, which were not looked at. C#'s rawstrings
> disable escaping entirely but add a new one: doubling quotes will insert
> a single quote in the resulting string (similar to quote-escaping in
> SQL or Smalltalk).
I've never touched C#. Your description sounds like the "custom syntax" I
described. I figured there were existing languages that did this, but none came
to mind (I should have known SQL did it though).
> * The docstring comment is incorrect, a docstring is a string in the
> first position of a module, a class statement or a function statement.
> A single-quoted string at these positions will yield a docstring.
>
> The triple-quoting is a string syntax embedding newlines (single-quoted
> strings can not contain literal newlines in Python, only escaped ones).
> Obviously, triple-quoted python string can be raw.
Yes I know, but in my (rather limited) experience with Python, triple-quoted
strings are typically used for docstrings. It was just an example anyway.
> * The quote-escaping oddness is less of an issue in Python as you can
> also use single-quotes for delimiting, or use triple-quoted strings
> (if you need to embed both single and double quotes in rawstrings).
If I need to embed both ''' and """ in a string, I'm out of luck. For example,
I cannot represent the following:
Triple-quoted strings in Python use the delimiters ''' and """.
> * Perl's quotes and quote-like operators would certainly deserve mention.
I'm not a Perl programmer, but IIRC they look like `q{string}`, right? I don't
think this is suitable for Rust because how would you lex `do q{foo()}`? Is
this the invalid construct `do some-string` or is it calling a function named q
with a closure?
> Also,
>
>> windows file paths
>
> windows paths can also use forward slashes so that's not a very
> interesting justification.
Not always. UNC paths must start with \\ (in my testing, //foo/bar/baz is not
interpreted as a UNC path by the Windows File Explorer, but \\foo/bar/baz is).
There's also paths that start with the verbatim prefix \\?\, which disables
interpretation of forward-slashes (among other things).
As I am actively engaged in writing a replacement for the path module, and am
currently expanding the test suite for Windows paths, raw strings would be
extremely useful to me.
-Kevin
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