Re: "Raw" string literals for elisp

[Stefan Kangas]

Anna Glasgall <anna@crossproduct.net> writes:

> 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.

I didn't study your patch, but I for one hope that this feature will
eventually get accepted.  IMHO, it would reduce a not insignificant
pain point for (some types of) programming in Emacs Lisp.

The argument against having "raw" strings in ELisp, if I understand,
it is that it will make some code in core more complex.  This is true,
but it will at the same time make even more code out there less
complex, or at least easier to read and understand.

Once it is fully implemented, there will of course be bugs, but over
time the feature will stabilize.  In the long run I think we will win
more by making Emacs Lisp more attractive (or at least less
unpleasant) to a generation that have already been spoiled by using
raw strings in other languages.