
A Short Quiz About Language Design - joeyespo
http://prog21.dadgum.com/172.html
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blktiger
What about using more that one double-quote characters(""some string"")? I
can't think of any reason that you would do that in a particular string. Of
course, you still need some way to escape it just in case, and there are
always going to be special characters that you need to escape (like end of
line characters), but you could probably get away with that for the majority
of cases.

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informatimago
Postscript uses parentheses:

    
    
        (Good bye (cruel) world!) show showpage
    

prints "Good bye (cruel) world!".

Common Lisp uses | to quote symbol names:

    
    
        (print '|Hello World!|)
    

prints: "Hello World!"

But in all cases, (whatever the advantages of using rare, or balanced
characters to quote strings), eventually you will need to insert one of those
characters in a string, so you will need an escape mechanism anyways. It is
not hard to understand. On the contrary, as soon as you need to quote text,
you can instructively introduce this escape mechanism to quote the quoting
character.

    
    
       "Hello ""small"" world!"
    
       "Hello \"small\" world!" 
    
       |A string with a \| in it.|
    
       (There are two things: 1\) the one, and 2\) the second.)
    

etc.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Well, yeah, he mentions that.

The point is that you typically need to use " and ' in text strings incredibly
more often than you need to use | in them. It would be interesting to run some
stats on github to determine how many person-years would be saved by not
having \' and \" all over the place (not to mention the improved readability).

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Dewie
When I had a some class with Prolog, we copied some code from the lecture
notes. The problem was that it wouldn't run, even though we had looked over it
dozens of times and it was syntactically correct. Turns out that there was a
string that was enclosed in quotes, _but a different kind of quotation mark
than what Prolog was using for strings_. So the string was not syntax
highlighted, and we noticed that if we deleted the quotes and typed in the
quotes manually with the keyboard, those quotes had a font that was a little
bit different.

I think the problem was that he had written it on a Mac, and we were using
Windows/Linux.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Isn't it more likely that something like Microsoft word replaced plain ol'
quotes with their "smart quotes"?

~~~
Dewie
We were using a text editor (notepad++ if it was Windows), and it would be
pretty invading for a very basic text editor to change text like that (copy
pasted at that). But honestly I don't know what these "smart quotes" are so it
might as well be it.

The only time that text encoding causes trouble is when I get something from
someone who has written it on a Mac, whether it is the obscure quotation marks
or a lot of gunk when copy pasting from PDFs.

