<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 6:41 AM, Mike Graham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mikegraham@gmail.com" target="_blank">mikegraham@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>Backslash line continuations are mostly to be avoided and making a change like this would seem to<br><br>a. make them slightly less obvious when they are used,<br></div>b. increase their use in cases where there aren't even long lines of code involved, and<br>
c. seem to encourage their use in general.<br><br></div>It seems to me that using parentheses is an already-existing, somewhat-better way to do what you're doing in your examples.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<br></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"></font></span></div></blockquote><div> </div><div>Your last statement seems to be missing the point of the larger discussion. Yes, parenthesis can be used in most cases where someone might use \ continuation. There seems to be strong sentiment to *not* remove \ continuation. Given that, is allowing comments after a continuation a reasonable change? I think so.</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>Notwithstanding that, these discussions are moving away from Guido's original comment about being bitten by implicit continuation of strings and not moving towards consensus. Let me throw in a few facts:</div>
</div><div><br></div><div>1) There are bugs caused by unintended implicit string concatenation.</div><div>2) Using + as it exists now is not a drop-in replacement for implicit string concatenation as it is a run-time operation and has a different precedence than the implicit concatenation.</div>
<div><div>3) There are programs that use implicit string concatenation that will need to be fixed if the feature is removed.</div></div><div>4) There are programs that use \ continuation that will need to be fixed if the feature is removed.</div>
<div>5) Explicit is better than implicit.</div><div><br></div><div>Personally, I would endorse deprecating and eventually removing implicit string concatenation and adding a syntax (not an operator) for explicit run-time string concatenation. The use of \ continuation as that syntax seems to me like a reasonable choice if we assume that this feature isn't going away. In particular, it works today so it's easy to start using it and linters can look for it. However, it's pointless to bikeshed the choice of syntax if there's no consensus that there should be an explicit syntax in the first place.</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Ron Adam <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ron3200@gmail.com" target="_blank">ron3200@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div id=":1dj" style="overflow:hidden">I was able to make a small patch that removed the some of the restrictions on the '\' for testing some ideas which does the following.<br><br> * Allow a line to continue on the same line.<br>
<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Aside from serving as a marker for explicit string concatenation, this means that I can freely sprinkle in backslashes anywhere I want, like this:</div><div><br></div><div> foo \ = \ bar + \ \ 3</div>
<div><br></div><div>That seems like a bad idea.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div id=":1dj" style="overflow:hidden"><snip><br><br>The reason \# works, but not \ #, is when the comment comes directly after the back slash, it's removed and leaves a (backslash + new-line) pair.<br></div></blockquote>
</div><br>Whether we require there be no space between \ and # or, conversely, require there be at least one whitespace character should not be based on the relative ease of patching the current code. Personally, I would prefer the latter as I believe requiring a space after \ will increase readability.<div>
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