String reboot (plain text)

[Brian Goetz]

Indeed so.  While many languages have been content to treat ML as a 
special case of raw, there's something somewhat odd and forced about 
lumping them together.  Of course, splitting has its overheads too -- 
but I think there is a path here to identifying the right dimensions of 
parameterization where we can have one feature, simply parameterized.  
The first dimension here is what to do about line spanning; the 
thin-vs-fat delimiter seems a good enough way to split that out, but 
there is still lots to talk about regarding accidental indentation and 
terminator normalization (1A) -- before we even get to raw-ness (2).  
But so far, teasing out ML as its own axis (which isn't fully finished) 
looks promising, and I like that these string literals are recognized as 
merely another flavor of the same basic feature.  Happy so far.

On 4/5/2019 2:12 PM, Alex Buckley wrote:
> As someone who was nervous about how raw string literals effectively 
> sidelined Unicode, I'm pleased that \uXXXX escapes are back. It's also 
> great that the traditional escape sequence \" will be interpreted as a 
> single " like it would be in a traditional string literal. Because, as 
> we all know, the code above started life as this painful noisy code:
>
> String result = "public class Main {\n" +
>                 "  public static void main(String... args) {\n" +
>                 "    System.out.println(\"Hello World!\");\n" +
>                 "  }\n" +
>                 "}\n";
>
> Now a developer can move forward in steps: today remove all the 
> end-of-line cruft involving \n and + that multi-line strings do for 
> free, and don't worry about mid-line escape sequences such as \" -- 
> convert them to " tomorrow, or next week, or not at all, your choice.
>
> Alex