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From: Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: multi-line Strings
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 10:43:49 -0600
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On 12/10/2012 6:17 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:04:33 -0500, Eric Sosman wrote:
>
>
>>       It's unfortunate that both Java and regex use \ so heavily,
>> because it leads to a lot of escaping-of-escapes and harms readability.
>> But why should it be a given that Java's literals should be different to
>> avoid conflict with regex syntax?  Why not change the regex syntax
>> instead, and use, say, ~ for the role now taken by \?  It might improve
>> regexes to the point where they're merely unreadable, instead of
>> intolerable.  ;-)
>
> I've always liked the Awk and Perl default convention of delimiting
> regexes with slashes: /regex/ - if their compilers can deal with this
> cleanly, the Java compiler could surely do the same.

Which works really well until you want to match the / character in 
pathnames. Or you want to lex but not parse the language--note that 
/foo/ is lexed as a regex if the preceding token is an operator and 
lexed as a sequence of tokens (DIV, IDENT, DIV) if the preceding token 
is an operator.

-- 
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not 
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth