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2 points by randallsquared 5949 days ago | link | parent

I like the idea of symbols as a special case of strings, but I'm not as sure of the details. In particular,

    In a double-quoted string, you will have to escape parens, double-quotes and single-quotes by prepending a single-quote.
seems like a bad idea to me. Perhaps I don't understand why a double-quoted string wouldn't already be satisfactorily quoted?


1 point by are 5949 days ago | link

Thanks; you're probably right that this is unnecessary, and wouldn't help the Arc parser much anyway.

You would have to escape double-quotes, though.

I like how Smalltalk handles this by allowing both single- and double-quotes as string delimiters:

"This is a string which includes two 'single quote' characters, which aren't escaped"

'This is a string which includes two "double quote" characters, which aren't escaped either'

This wouldn't work for Arc, though, if you also want to be able to use a _single_ single-quote for quoting symbols.

I've removed the sentence you quoted from my proposal.

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2 points by ehird 5949 days ago | link

wrong

smalltalk "abc"= comment

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