New subject: syntax...(strings/interpolation/here docs)

13 Feb 2002

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

David Feuer

D. Tweed

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