Re: Backslash-newline escape as a line continuation rather than a newline?

["Stuart P. Bentley" <stuart@...>]

I agree - this is one break with C that doesn't really make sense. Lua  
already has a string constructor syntax that allows newline preservation  
with no additional syntax (long string constructors); why have the other  
syntax aim to fill the same role less effectively? Having escaped newlines  
discard the newline (like C) would allow quoted string constructors to  
fill a niche that no other string constructor can currently, and if you  
really need to preserve each newline, as in C, you just need to prepend  
each escaped line ending with an explicit \n (ending each line with the  
two characters longer "\n\").

On Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:41:08 -0600, M Joonas Pihlaja  
<jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> In Lua 5.2 string literals could the backslash-newline escape code
> swallow the newline character rather than embedding it into the
> string?  This would be similar to C's continuation lines.
>
> The motivation for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way of having
> really long string literals in a Lua source file split across multiple
> lines without extra runtime overhead.  As far as I can tell, I either
> have to use shorter pieces and concatenate them at runtime, or add
> extra newlines to the string and remove them at runtime.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Joonas