Re: Free format strings?

["Peter Hill" <corwin@...>]

Peter Hill wrote:
> However there doesn't seem to be a way to wrap long strings *without*
> inserting a newline. Tradionally, "\" by itself has been used as a
> free-format wrap character for strings. So:
>     "abc\
>     def"
> was the same as
>     "abcdef"
>
> Does Lua have such a feature? If not it should.

Björn De Meyer:
> The way you do it in Lua is simply to say
>
>    "abc"
> .. "def"
>

That's certainly clear looking (and standard). Thanks. It might do to add an
example like that to the manual, though, for the benefit of unobservant
people like myself :-).

I actually have to type it as:
    a = "abc"..
    "def"
rather than
    a = "abc"
    .."def"
as that gives the error
    stdin:1: unexpected symbol near `..'

Yet another case of the (apparent) general free-format / line-break
principle... that if a syntactic sequence seems finished, and a line-break
is encountered, then it is deemed to *be* finished. Is that principle stated
in general terms in the manual somewhere? I've only encountered the one
specific example in the function call section but it seems to be a general,
simple & sensible rule.


> Yes, its' a concatenation, but string concatenation in Lua is a VM
> primitive, so it's not that inefficient.

True, but I'd feel more comfortable if the manual stated that the parser
automatically compiles <constant string><cat><constant string> as a single
string.

*cheers*
Peter Hiil.