On 10/1/07, Steven Bethard
On 10/1/07, Tal Einat
wrote:
As for my experience with regexps, the current behavior is only useful when using both single and double quotes in a single regexp string; I can't recall when I last did so.
I have seen regular expressions that look for a double-quoted string which might contain an apostrophe, but don't remember writing one. Other than that, I can't remember *ever* needing to unless I was really (at some level) saying "either of these two"; I also can't remember doing it without being annoyed at having to figure out how many ticks were there, and whether it was double-single or three singles, or what. For me, usability and readability would both improve by offering a named special character, such as \q.
From the teaching point of view, the preferred behavior for "raw strings" would be no escaping for quotes - make them escape-less, period.
Exactly my feeling. Thanks for putting it so clearly. =)
Agreed. And also from a "what do *I* have to remember", or a "how does this interact when it gets passed to something else" perspective, because it would remove one level of escaping. -jJ