Re: Re: syntax...(strings/interpolation/here docs)

From: Joe Does anybody with their elbows in the code think variable interpolation and/or multi-line strings are good/doable ideas?

Can't say I have my elbows in the code, but I think that multi-line strings could be useful. I'm not sure what I think about variable interpolation... I imagine it would make the language somewhat more difficult to parse. What would this be like, anyway? Something like "foo $(bar) baz" = "foo"++bar++"baz" ? And then you'd have to have some sort of quoting rule, for dollar signs followed by parens... I guess you'd probably want some variant that automatically applies show...

Would this be the sort of change one could make without a lot of previous familiarity with the implementation of Hugs/Ghc?

You'd certainly need to be familiar with how to specify syntax, and how to write a parser.

It would be a *signifigant* boon to those of us trying to get haskell into organizations by using it as "maintainable perl/sh", and

Haskell is not a "maintainable perl/sh". It is not a good language for simple shell scripts, and is not good for string processing either. Have you tried Scsh? Or Python? I don't think that supporting string hacking is a major goal for Haskell.

generally make an already delightful language more delightful.

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