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Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:42:46 +1100
Subject: Re: Py-dea: Streamline string literals now!
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.python:18146

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Nathan Rice
<nathan.alexander.rice@gmail.com> wrote:
> Quotes are obnoxious in the nesting sense because everyone uses quotes
> for string delimiters. =A0By the same token, quotes are wonderful
> because not only are they intuitive to programmers, but they are
> intuitive in general. =A0Parenthesis are pretty much in the same boat...
> I *HATE* them nested, but they are so intuitive that replacing them is
> a non starter; =A0Just write code that doesn't nest parenthesis.

Parentheses have different starting and ending delimiters and must be
'properly nested' (ie there must be exactly-matching inner parens
inside any given set of outer parens (note that English has similar
rules - you can't mis-nest parentheses (at any depth) in either
language)). You can't guarantee the same about quoted strings -
suppose the starting delimiter were ' and the ending " (or vice
versa), it still wouldn't deal with the issue of coming across an
apostrophe inside a quoted string.

In actual fact, the real problem is that quoted strings need to be
able to contain _anything_. The only true solution to that is
length-provided strings:

s =3D "4spam
q =3D "14Hello, world!\n

This works beautifully in interchange formats, but rather poorly in
source code (or, for that matter, anything editable).

ChrisA