On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Terry Jan Reedy
'Escape' means 'ignore the normal meaning of the following character'.
\ is not only an escape character as you define it. Sometimes it means the exact opposite of that: the following character has special meaning, e.g., \n \t etc. And it is also not the case that \ only applies to the single following character. \123 is a four-character escape sequence, \u1234 is a six-character sequence and \U12345678 is a ten-character sequence! (And Python is not the only language that recognizes long escape sequences.) So in this case, while the current escape sequence is \<newline>, the new proposed one is \<whitespace-other-than-newline>*[#<anything-but-newline>*]<newline> Or writing this in the style used in the python docs: "\" *whitespace**-other-than-newline* * [ "#" *anything-but-newline* * ] * newline* I understand if you disagree with the proposal. But I don't think an argument that it is fundamentally ill-defined and ignorant of history is valid. --- Bruce Latest blog post: Alice's Puzzle Page http://www.vroospeak.com Learn how hackers think: http://j.mp/gruyere-security