Re: Feature proposal: \x## notation in strings

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> Ah, but this is not "ten lines for you, ten lines for me". This is "ten
> lines for all of the people expressing support for the feature".
> Hexadecimal characters are a well-known & oft-used escape sequence in
> many (most) procedural languages (a paradigm tag Lua shares). This is
> not a whacky feature someone thought up for their own use; it is
> something that many users have expressed surprise in __not__ being
> available in Lua.

Again, not arguing in favor or against the feature, just to make things
straight. The "all of the people" is around 20, currently. The list
has some 1700 members. Even if all of them ask for the feature,
that would be a *very* small fraction of Lua users. And a very biased
fraction.

(If each group of 20 users [or 200, for that matter] would have its own
10 lines of code, Lua would end really bloated.)

Technical arguments (hexa is tight, can be unambiguous, is good for
masks and other bit tricks) are wellcome. Non-technical ones ("many
people support it", "many people expect it", "many other languages have
it") have no weight.

-- Roberto