Re: Raw string literals in Emacs lisp.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

David Kastrup writes:

 > Reports of XEmacs being dead may be exaggerated, but it does look a
 > lot like suspended animation.

I'm OK with the latter description.

 > When rawstrings are supported, it becomes more expedient to recognize
 > things like \n and \t, probably also \f in regexps (\b is already
 > taken).

Sure.  AFAIK most of the modern regexp syntaxes do.  I guess that it's
possible that there are regexps out in the real world that contain
"\n" and work because "n" would work there too, so that is a change in
semantics.  (It's a shame that Emacs doesn't consider that kind of
thing an error, because it's almost certainly a bug.)

I don't really see a point in \f, though.  Emacs users (at least
old-timers) are used to seeing "^L" in their code, and I haven't seen
an Emacs configured to display that as an actual form feed in at least
20 years.  \t is useful because it displays the same as a number
(nondeterministic) of spaces, and \n is useful because embedding an
actual newline in a string messes up your indentation, often leaving a
lone double quote on the next line (when newline terminates the
string).