[swift-evolution] multi-line string literals.

[Dave Abrahams]

on Sat Apr 30 2016, David Waite <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> In my opinion, one problem is that we don’t have a reference to a
> laundry or wish list of what features we would like around string
> literals in the language. Without evaluating a proposal against all of
> those features (moves forward, doesn’t impact, creates later issues
> for) it is hard to evaluate.

+1, thank you!

> My guess here at an exhaustive list:
>
> Main goals:
> - reduce the impact on readability when dealing with certain kinds of string literals
> - reduce the amount of editing needed when inserting/referencing text from an external source to be used as a string literal
>
> Specific tasks/asks:
> - for large string literals, reduce the amount of editing needed to span multiple lines
> - for strings literals meant to represent multi-line text, allow the visual newline to be used rather than an encoding
> 	(note: this may mean in the first case newlines are considered
> formatting of the literal, while in the second they are considered
> part of the represented text)
> - with string literals spanning multiple lines, allow for the author
> to indent the literal to match flow with surrounding code without
> impacting the represented text
> - allow for text with double quotes to be represented in a string literal without requiring those quotes to be escaped
> - have the ability to disable all/most escape interpretation to reduce impact on readability of certain text
> - take into account that regular expressions, when added, will likely
> require different escaping rules than text string literals
>
> Approach-specific
> - if allowing for inline blocks of strings delimited by start/end points e.g. here docs, data segments
> 	- if the block end is on its own line, control whether that newline is part of the represented text
>
> -DW
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-- 
Dave