On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:35:38 -0400, John Cowan <[email protected]> said:
> Vassil Nikolov scripsit: >> For example (it is a rare case, but I have encountered it), when >> generating literal strings programmatically and not having a way >> to determine what character is inserted in the generated value, >> it is convenient to simply precede the unknown character with the >> escape character and rest assured that the string literal will always >> be well-formed. > We actually don't do that, and for this reason: If it was guaranteed that > \q meant the same as q, it would be impossible to give \q a meaning in > some future version of the language. Therefore, we say that \q is > undefined, so that it can be treated by an implementation as an error, > as q, or as something new in advance of future standardization. ---When the same character is overloaded to be both an escape character and a prefix indicating a special meaning of what follows, yes. I was just saying that the other trade-off also has some merit; I fully realize that this is (most likely) "academic". ---Vassil. -- Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николов | <[email protected]> "Be careful how you fix what you don't understand." (Brooks 2010, 185) _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
