Re: Continuation lines

[John W. Eaton]

On 04/03/2013 11:04 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> Yes, I was thinking of this case:
>
>     [1, 2\
>      3, 4]
>
> You can't really replace that backslash with anything but the
> ellipses.

OK.  I guess I'm wondering whether it is really a big advantage to
have two different types of continuation markers.

> Why, because of the left division ambiguity? If that's the reason, I
> still don't think this ambiguity has ever caused problems. If the
> reason is so that \ behaves exactly like ..., then I can agree, but
> I'm happy with the slight discrepancy here, as long as you don't see
> other problems with it.

No, I don't think there is a problem other than the duplication and
that's not a huge problem.

I'm proposing to eliminate comments after \ just to simplify the
lexer.  There don't seem to be any uses of this feature in the .m
files in Octave.  There are some in Octave Forge .m files, but I only
see one file where the continuation markers actually needed (the
others are inside parens).

> > But either way, I think we should make ... work as in Matlab, which
> > means allowing arbitrary text to follow it but not allowing it as a
> > continuation marker inside character strings.  I guess we can start
> > there.
>
> Agreed.

OK, I think I can do that without too much trouble.

jwe