Py-dea: Streamline string literals now!

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Nathan Rice
<nathan.alexander.rice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quotes are obnoxious in the nesting sense because everyone uses quotes
> for string delimiters.  By the same token, quotes are wonderful
> because not only are they intuitive to programmers, but they are
> intuitive in general.  Parenthesis are pretty much in the same boat...
> I *HATE* them nested, but they are so intuitive that replacing them is
> a non starter;  Just 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 = "4spam
q = "14Hello, world!\n

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

ChrisA