raw strings and \

[plahey at alumni.caltech.edu]

Interesting, so thats where this comes from.

Of course the problem is that I thought that a raw string was a
different animal than a regular string (i.e. truely "raw" where no
characters are special, except of course the closing quote) so parsing
consistency is surprising to an end user (who has an overly-simplistic
mental model).

I'm sure that this choice greatly simplifies the internals of Python.
As an end user, of course, I couldn't care less about this (just as my
end users don't care about my problems :-) ).  I would still prefer my
still-bloody raw strings, but I can live with the slightly-cooked ones
now that I've got it...

Thanks!