From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
To: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
Cc: stephen@xemacs.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Raw string literals in Emacs lisp.
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 08:15:14 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <874mxro425.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <E1XETkT-0001c1-7r@fencepost.gnu.org> (Richard Stallman's message of "Mon, 04 Aug 2014 21:41:09 -0400")
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> Well, I am not sure about the size of the wart in practice. It has not
> apparently caused much of a disturbance for XEmacs. It certainly seems
> less relevant in practice than our traditional wart
>
> (info "(emacs) Left Margin Paren")
>
> with regard to reliable detection of strings out of context.
>
> That problem is in a different feature (finding the start of a
> function), and we recommend a preventive measure to avoid it.
The preventive measure is not working in source buffers other than Elisp
and it requires manual intervention. M-q seems to avoid _moving_ an
opening parent to the front of the line in strings: that is already a
big help in avoiding them to creep in when reformatting code.
auto-fill-mode however doesn't, so you don't get help against
accidentally introducing them.
> So it is not a real problem. In Elisp, it is a solved problem.
More like a "problem with known manual workarounds".
> But even if it were a real problem, this argument is invalid in form.
> The existence of one problem we can't fix does not make it good
> to create another.
Sure. I was just putting it in perspective: in practice the ambiguity
of r#"?\" without leading context is not going to cause anywhere near
the pain users already have to deal with. I am not saying that this is
a non-problem. But in contrast to the paren problem, it is a fringe
problem not likely to occur in practice. So I consider it likely to be
less annoying in its effects to users than a raw string syntax diverging
from that of XEmacs which would basically imply that any portable code
has to forego raw strings completely.
Of course, if Emacs can come up with a significantly better proposal,
there is some likelihood that it will eventually _also_ be adopted by
XEmacs.
But as long as strings and raw strings share the same ending delimiter
and/or the ending delimiter of a raw string has a valid other syntactic
interpretation on its own, the ambiguity will be there. ASCII does not
offer a wealth of delimiter candidates, and having to write something
like #r"fa\fa d\fd \fd safa"#r would likely be more annoying than the
problem it is supposed to cure.
I am not saying that #r"..." is what we should ultimately take, just
that I don't see the counterargument as weighing all that strongly. I
actually would likely prefer something like #"..." as input but that's
even more likely to trip up backward parsing.
--
David Kastrup
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-08-05 6:15 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 51+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-07-25 19:47 Raw string literals in Emacs lisp Matthew Plant
2014-07-25 19:56 ` Tassilo Horn
2014-07-25 20:06 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-25 20:15 ` Tassilo Horn
2014-07-25 20:24 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-25 20:33 ` Tom Tromey
2014-07-25 21:40 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-26 1:19 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-07-26 5:28 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-26 5:45 ` chad
2014-07-26 19:39 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-27 12:27 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-07-27 13:03 ` David Kastrup
2014-07-27 20:58 ` David Caldwell
2014-07-27 23:17 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-28 18:27 ` Richard Stallman
2014-07-28 19:32 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-29 19:15 ` Richard Stallman
2014-07-30 0:26 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-30 4:28 ` Richard Stallman
2014-07-30 18:54 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-28 2:16 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-07-28 7:43 ` Andreas Schwab
2014-07-30 20:28 ` Ted Zlatanov
2014-07-30 20:41 ` David Caldwell
2014-07-30 20:54 ` Ted Zlatanov
2014-07-30 21:01 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-30 21:16 ` Ted Zlatanov
2014-07-30 21:19 ` Matthew Plant
2014-07-31 10:13 ` Ted Zlatanov
2014-08-02 8:47 ` Alan Mackenzie
2014-08-02 9:14 ` David Kastrup
2014-08-02 10:23 ` Alan Mackenzie
2014-08-02 15:51 ` Richard Stallman
2014-08-03 6:50 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-08-03 7:29 ` David Kastrup
2014-08-03 13:12 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-08-03 13:27 ` David Kastrup
2014-08-03 15:01 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-08-04 1:55 ` Richard Stallman
2014-08-04 6:38 ` David Kastrup
2014-08-05 1:41 ` Richard Stallman
2014-08-05 6:15 ` David Kastrup [this message]
2014-08-03 13:40 ` David Kastrup
2014-08-03 15:06 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-08-04 1:55 ` Richard Stallman
2014-08-02 9:17 ` Andreas Schwab
2014-07-28 1:29 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2014-07-26 21:37 ` Thorsten Jolitz
2014-07-29 6:32 ` William Xu
2014-07-29 7:40 ` Andreas Schwab
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