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

[Duncan Cross <duncan.cross@...>]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Alexander Gladysh <agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Just to show one use case, I use a module system where you start each
>>> module with:
>
>>> require 'dokidoki.module'
>>> [[  list, of, definitions, to, export  ]]
>
>> Sure, with every syntax change, some existing code needs to be fixed. But in
>> the case of this (proposed) change:
>> a) there is not so much code to fix (cases like the above are rare), and
>> b) the fix is local and trivial
>
> I have a *lot* of code relying on this behaviour.
>
> I use it for string building.
>
> local buf = { }
> local function cat(v)
>  buf[#buf + 1] = v
>  return cat
> end
>
> cat "foo " (bar) " baz"
>
> For complex cases like code generation string of calls can be quite
> long. Also, adding extra braces would impact readability.
>
> Alexander.
>

I thought about mentioning this use case too. I agree that it's a
useful pattern and would be a shame to lose it. But then I realised
that the proposed change actually shouldn't affect it - there's no
reason I can see why a string literal followed by a parenthesised
expression, or vice versa, wouldn't still work exactly the same way.
The only case that gets affected is when you have multiple string
literals in a row, but in the specific case of string building, the
net result happens to be exactly the same anyway - the strings are
just concatenated at a different time.

-Duncan