[swift-evolution] multi-line string literals

[Travis Tilley]

Ah. My sincerest apologies for making that assumption then.

Your suggestion doesn't solve my use case, personally. I'm also *hoping* to
officially propose something less complex than heredocs once there's been
enough feedback.


-Travis Tilley


On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com>
wrote:

> > I'm not entirely sure how to respond to this, but I think some of your
> suggestions might go against the goal of having less noise in defining a
> multi-line string. It's actually more to type than:
> > "this is the first line \n" +
> > "this is the second line \n"
> > ​...which we can already do.
> >
> > Your suggestion that each line should end in \n makes me think you're
> actually trying to have a bit of fun with me, but I can't really tell and I
> really don't want to be rude by making that assumption.
>
> I am being serious. This proposal does require more characters, it’s true.
> However, it doesn’t require more *reading*—because the leading indicators
> will generally line up, you can ignore them and read everything to the
> right, like the “> “ used to demarcate your text above from my text—and
> with an editor feature to select several lines and quote them (the way you
> can with comments in most editors), it wouldn’t require more *writing*
> either. And although it uses more characters, it *also* unmistakably sets
> off quoted material from code, comments, other multiline string literals,
> and anything else, while being unambiguous about whether indentation is
> intended to style the literal or be part of it, without a bunch of funky
> obscure modifier characters like "<<-END".
>
> The \n thing was an idle thought being presented for discussion, not a
> concrete suggestion, but it was also not a joke. (I realized after sending
> it, however, that the trailing newline problem can be solved by simply
> having a rule that you strip one trailing newline. If you want your string
> to end with a newline, include a sacrificial blank “Foo>” line at the end
> of the literal. Some sort of modifier to indicate the trailing newline
> behavior is possible too, but see the previous paragraph for my thoughts on
> those.)
>
> I’ve used and loved heredocs in Perl and Ruby, but I always understood
> that they have significant problems. That experience shaped this proposal.
>
> --
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20151211/6ea570fe/attachment.html>