[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: string-qq-0.0.2

[Dave Bayer]

Part of the dominance of scripting languages is clean support for heredocs. So much of every arena of life comes down to getting "It's not about me!" I love Haskell but it doesn't get this. Imagine a document that's nominally Haskell, but about 80% some other language such as TeX (e.g. code for a self-generating textbook). Anything short of "these lines belong to the other language, with not a single intervening character in the way" simply doesn't work. So, yes, Haskell supports multi-line strings, but not heredocs, a subtle but crucial syntactic distinction. Restated, one can cut and paste many entire lines of foreign code into a heredoc, with no worries about conversion.

Heredocs should be part of the base spec of any credible language, with the requirement "Can the language completely disappear behind another language, in the source file?" As I said, the key issue is getting "It's not about me!"

On Jun 28, 2011, at 1:57 AM, Jean-Marie Gaillourdet wrote:

> Hi Audrey,
> 
> are you aware that Haskell already supports multi-line strings?
> 
> foo = "This is a\
>       \multi-line\
>       \string!"
> 
> See Section 2.6 of http://haskell.org/onlinereport/lexemes.html
> 
> Regards,
>  Jean