[Haskell-cafe] string literals and haskell'

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

I can see problems with this. This comes up when typing windows file path's:

"C:\path to my\directory\boo"

If this now reports no errors, who wants to guess which come up as
escape codes, and which don't. The way other languages like C# have
dealt with this is by introducing a new type of quoted string:

@":\/"

In a @" string, there are no escape characters, except for "" which
means ". There are various other quoting mechanisms available - but
all have the problem of being yet another thing to learn.

Thanks

Neil




On 10/22/07, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> I've just been annoyed with errors ghc reports when I use a string literal
> such as ":\/:" (which is a contructor in darcs).  Of course, it wants
> ":\\/:", but I'd rather type the former.  Is there any reason why the
> language couldn't be modified (e.g. in haskell') to make the former legal?
> i.e. to treat string literals with '\\' followed by a character that
> doesn't describe an escape as a literal backslash? It makes the rules a bit
> more complicated, but doesn't modify the meaning of any currently-legal
> code, and removes a potential error.
> --
> David Roundy
> Department of Physics
> Oregon State University
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