Re: multilines strings "a la python"

[Jose F. Morales]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Ulrich Neumerkel <address@hidden> wrote:

Jose:
> Unfortunately that text contains extra spaces which are not removed so that
> is not a solution in general. Would ISO allow using `...` as multiline
> string delimiter?

What is the use case for having significant spaces at the end of a
line *and* the need to see the text structure verbatim.  This is
certaintly not the text of a programming language where only trailing
spaces are not significant except for continuation lines in strings.

Sometimes trailing spaces really matter and as a programmer I would not like to add them if they are not needed, specially if the text in the string is not code (it may be HTML, css, SQL, etc.).

 

The syntax of back quoted string (* 6.4.7 *) is defined already.  So
if you want an extension using them you have to use that syntax and
maybe only recognize a subset of it as a valid extension.  The syntax
is essentially the same of the double quoted list tokken (* 6.4.6 *)
and quoted token (* 6.4.2 *).

The main issue raised by Algaba is that some modern programming languages realized that multiline strings for large pieces of verbatim text are useful (either as heredocs in shell, Python's """, or SWI's quasi quotation).

Assuming that multiline strings are really useful, is there any simple and ISO-compatible way to extend the syntax that Prolog implementations could follow?

--

Jose