Re: "Raw" string literals for elisp

[<tomas@tuxteam.de>]

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On Thu, Sep 09, 2021 at 03:33:44PM +0200, Mattias Engdegård wrote:

[...]

> Anna, I'm ashamed for welcoming a new friendly contributor as Mr. No. In a weak attempt to compensate, here are some related areas in Emacs that might benefit from your energy and skill:

I wouldn't give up that quickly. Actually, I think this discussion
itself is invaluable, since it brings forward the issues involved
in the design of such a feature.

 - For one, as Stefan points out, you don't really want totally
   "raw" strings. Some escaping mechanism is desirable.
 - Then, it becomes clear that they will ease the biggest pain
   in regexps, but they won't "fix" everything. Some work in
   the regexp part seems desirable, too.
 - People have been looking at what other languages do. Some
   of them (e.g. Perl) let you choose the delimiter (the operators
   `q' and `qq').

There are a couple of design decisions: just "hard" raw strings, and
live with the limitation that tabs, newlines etc. are awkward? Use
an alternative escape char (e.g. tilde)? Other "crazy" ideas might
be examined ("here" documents? Perl has them, too).

The discussion comes up every now and then; even if no code ends up
being produced (I'd hope it does!) this might be a valuable resource
for the next courageous person giving it a try.

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