On Wed, 30 Jul 2014 13:41:19 -0700 David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org> wrote:

DC> On 7/30/14 1:28 PM, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
>> On Sun, 27 Jul 2014 13:58:37 -0700 David Caldwell <david@porkrind.org> wrote:
>>
DC> Why not, then, skip rawstrings completely and go directly to a regular
DC> expression reader: #r// (or even just #//) instead of #r""?
>>
>> For shell commands, for instance, it would be convenient to have
>> rawstrings because they often have internal backslash escapes.

DC> That's precisely the point I made later in my email

Sorry I didn't see it.

DC> rawstrings used in shell don't want things like \n escaped, but
DC> regexps do (otherwise you have to add "\n" literal support to the
DC> regexp engine). There's 2 usages with competing semantics trying to
DC> use one generic interface. I still posit that having a syntax
DC> directly for regexps would be beneficial. And I think focusing on
DC> regexps is more important in Emacs as it happens more than
DC> complicated shell commands.

Heredocs are generally useful and popular and would also be supported by
this syntax.  But please don't take that as a knock against regexp
literal support, it's just not something I have needed.

DC> Sadly it sounds like a the #r// would be a no-go due to the Emacs
DC> requirements of parsing it in reverse (I assume because '/' is a valid
DC> lisp symbol character).

I have no opinion on that, I just want a simple syntax for literal data :)

How about using a Unicode character as the marker? (prepares for stoning)

Ted