<html><body><div style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div><br></div><div><br></div><hr id="zwchr" data-marker="__DIVIDER__"><div data-marker="__HEADERS__"><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #1010FF;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Maurizio Cimadamore" <maurizio.cimadamore@oracle.com><br><b>To: </b>"Guy Steele" <guy.steele@oracle.com><br><b>Cc: </b>"amber-spec-experts" <amber-spec-experts@openjdk.org><br><b>Sent: </b>Friday, March 15, 2024 5:31:28 PM<br><b>Subject: </b>Re: Update on String Templates (JEP 459)<br></blockquote></div><div data-marker="__QUOTED_TEXT__"><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #1010FF;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><div class="markdown-here-wrapper" style="">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Hi</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">On 15/03/2024 16:07,
Guy Steele wrote:</p>
<div class="markdown-here-exclude">
<blockquote cite="mid:942AC667-A175-4F72-9495-684F2FF9236E@oracle.com">
<div>Then again, now that I ponder the space of use cases, it
may be that, despite my initial enthusiasm, having a
separate string interpolation syntax may not carry its
weight if its uses are relatively rare. We always have the
option of using a string template and then applying an
interpolation processor (which might be spelled
`String.of(<template>)` or
`(<template>).interpolate()` or some other way), and
about all we lose from that approach is the ability to use
string interpolation to specify a constant expression—for
which we still have the old-fashioned alternative of using
`+` concatenation. If we drop string interpolation, we can
then drop the INTERPOLATION prefix, and we are back to a
single-prefix model, and the remaining question is whether
that prefix is optional, at least in some cases. Okay, I
think I now have a better understanding of the relationships
among the various proposals in the design space. Thanks for
your patience.</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">I think the advantage
for <em>not</em> having a string interpolation prefix, is that
then interpolation is “just another processor” e.g. a static
method somewhere that takes a string template and returns a
String. Another String::format, in a way. So that leads to a
rather uniform design.</p>
<div class="markdown-here-exclude">
<blockquote cite="mid:942AC667-A175-4F72-9495-684F2FF9236E@oracle.com">
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>And now that I have that better understanding, I think I
lean toward (a) abandoning string interpolation and (b)
having a single, short, _non-optional_ prefix for templates
(“$” would be a plausible choice), on the grounds that I
think it makes code more readable if templates are always
distinguished up front from strings—and this is especially
helpful when the templates are rather long and any `\{`
present might be far from the beginning. It has a minimal
number of cases to explain:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>“…”
string literal, must not contain \{…}, type String</div>
<div>$”…”
template literal, may contain \{…}, type StringTemplate</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Yep, I agreee this a
very principled way to look at the problem.</p></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>[...]<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>This is how i like to explain the design space to myself.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>We have two kind of strings, tainted string and untainted string (this is not new, see [1]).<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>An untainted string is a string that can be escaped properly, in our case a StringTemplate. A tainted string is just a String.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>We do not want a String to be a StringTemplate, because it means all untainted strings are tainted strings.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>We do not want a StringTemplate to be a String, because it means that all tainted strings are untainted strings.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>So both are different types, with neither a subtype relationship nor an automatic conversion between them.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>For the literals, we need two different constructs otherwise we will have a conversion between tainted and untainted strings,<br></div><div>we also need the literal to construct an untainted string to be different and upfront to easily distinguish an untainted string from a tainted string, so<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>- "..." constructs a String, a tainted string,<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>- TEMPLATE"..." constructs a StringTemplate, an untainted string.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>About string interpolation, this is another way to create a String and this is not directly related to a string being tainted or not, so it's a kind of orthogonal in term of design.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>It can not be a prefix like INTERPOLATE, because this is different in nature from TEMPLATE, TEMPLATE creates another kind of String, interpolation creates just a String.<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>Having a static method (a processor) that creates a String from a StringTemplate creates a common conduit to get a tainted string from any untainted strings, which makes the distinction between untainted string and tainted string less relevant. So i would advise to not go in that direction.</div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><blockquote style="border-left:2px solid #1010FF;margin-left:5px;padding-left:5px;color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><div class="markdown-here-wrapper" style="">
<p style="margin: 0px 0px 1.2em !important;">Maurizio</p>
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</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Rémi<br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking</a><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div><div><br data-mce-bogus="1"></div></div></div></body></html>