Re: Fwd: Heritage of Lua syntax for multi-line strings and comments

[Mouse <mouse@...>]

>> `--[[[[[        third level styled text comment    ]]]]]`
> [...]
> That said, '=' is as good as any other character that cannot follow
> '[' in regular Lua code. (Better yet if it cannot come before ']').

Well, the original text specifically wrote of "leav[ing] [] in my eyes
ugly and overlong monospaced texts [...] to embrace variable width
fonts".  From that point of view, = is _not_ "as good as any other
character", because it is typically a relatively wide character in
non-monospaced fonts.

Thinking of characters that are typically narrow, what come to mind
offhand are !, |, `, :, plus others (eg ¦) if you're willing to
consider non-ASCII characters.  Maybe one of them could be pressed into
service.

Of course, one could also take the stance that such problems are
artifically created by insisting on non-monospaced fonts; personally, I
find non-monospaced fonts significantly more ambiguous and therefore
unusable for tasks requiring programming-level precision.  (I would
expect, for example, to have little to no visual distinction between I
and l.  Even the monospaced font I'm using for this mail has only one
pixel different between them.)

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