I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t tied this proposal so strongly to regular expressions! It is indeed the wrong motivation. Even as a ten year veteran of Perl development I’m not sure we want to bake it into the language quite so tightly (isn’t a part of Foundation?) What would /regex/ represent - an instance of NSRegularExpression? Would the flags be pattern options or matching options? This is a whole other debate.
For me the focus of raw strings was a sort of super-literal literal which has many applications. The r”literal” syntax has a precedent in Python and there seemed to be a syntactic gap that could be occupied but perhaps there are other alternatives we could discuss. It would be a shame to see ‘quoted strings’ be used for this however. I still live in hope one day it will be used for single character UNICODE values. John > On 23 Nov 2017, at 19:10, Brent Royal-Gordon <br...@architechies.com> wrote: > > On Nov 23, 2017, at 11:15 AM, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote: > >> Until we figure out that path forward for regex’s, I think they aren’t the >> right motivation for this proposal. > > 1. Even in our shining pattern matching future—a future which I, for one, am > eager to hasten—we will still need to interoperate with NSRegularExpression > and other Perl 5-compatible regex engines. > > 2. Code generation. > > 3. Windows-style paths. > > 4. Doesn’t LaTeX use backslashes? > > 5. Etc. > > I think the Motivation section undersells this proposal. Regexes are a strong > short-run use case, but in the long run, we’ll need this for other things. In > both cases, though, raw literals will be a useful addition to the language, > improving the clarity of Swift code much like multiline literals already > have. > > -- > Brent Royal-Gordon > Sent from my iPhone >
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