Re: "Raw" string literals for elisp

[Anna Glasgall]

On Wed, 2021-09-08 at 09:10 -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I've long been annoyed by the number of backslashes needed when
> > using
> > string literals in elisp for certain things (regexes, UNC paths,
> > etc),
> 
> I most other discussions around this in the past, regexps were the
> only
> significant cases.  I don't know what you have in mind behind the
> "etc.", but as for UNC: how often od you use them in ELisp and do you
> really need backslashes there (I thought slashes work almost as well
> in
> most of Windows)?
> 

Cards on the table here: yes, regexes are 99.999% of the motivation
here :) UNC paths were a somewhat contrived example.

During the course of working on this, I came across the following in I
think syntax.el:


               (while (re-search-forward
"\\(\\\\\\\\\\)\\(?:\\(\\\\\\\\\\)\\|\\((\\(?:\\?[0-
9]*:\\)?\\|[|)]\\)\\)" bound t)

which I feel by itself rather justifies this work.

> And AFAIC adding raw strings just to halve the number of backslashes
> in
> regexps seems both too much and too little: you'd likely prefer a new
> regexp syntax which doesn't require backslashes for grouping
> and alternation.
> 

I would be _thrilled_ to have that, but that seemed like it'd be even
_more_ work than this is already ballooning into. And it does seem to
me that raw-literal syntax is something that'd be generally useful even
outside the use case of regexes.

> 
>         Stefan "not a big fan of raw strings in ELisp"
> 

thanks,

Anna