On Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 10:09:41AM -0400, David Mertz wrote:

> One big problem with the current obvious way would be shared by the
> proposal. This hits me fairly often.
>
> colors1 = "red green blue".split()  # happy
>
> Later
>
> colors2 = "cyan   forest green  burnt umber".split()
> # oops, not what I wanted, quote each separately

It isn't shared by the proposal.

  colors2 = %w[cyan   forest green  burnt\x20umber]


Escaping the space ``\ `` might be nicer, but escaping an invisible
character is problematic (see the problems with the explict line
continuation character ``\``) and we may not be able to add any new
escape characters to the language. However a hex escape will do the
trick.