Re: replacing endline

[Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@math.ntnu.no>]

+ Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>:

| AFAICS the same escape syntax that are used for strings in elisp
| could be used for strings read in the minibuffer. In princip I mean,
| not now of course.

Sure, in principle you could choose any escape convention you please.

| To me it is not unnatural at all. But maybe it is very inconvenient?
| Could you please explain what you mean from that point of view?

Well, if backslash was an escape character in string reads in the
minibuffer, any latex user who wants to replace \foo by \bar would
have to type those strings as \\foo and \\bar.  That would confuse
newbies, and be inconvenient to more experienced folk.  It gets worse
if you need to use query-replace-regexp, which also uses backslashes
for an escape convention, so you might end up having to type a
quadruple backslash in place of a single one.  Ouch!

Besides, the C-q escape convention is not only for the minibuffer.
It's for every kind of buffer!  Once you realise that there is nothing
that special about the minibuffer - it's just an ordinary buffer with
a peculiar mode - you will see that this is very logical indeed.

(I think I am going to bow out of this discussion now.  I have said
all I have to say on the topic, and can't think of a way to state it
more clearly.)

-- 
* Harald Hanche-Olsen     <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
  when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
  -- Bertrand Russell