On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Lennart Augustsson
I agree that backslash string wrapping is obscure. I do use it a lot, but I would not be sad to see it go.
On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Henrik Nilsson
I find it quite neat, also use it a lot, and would be sad to see it go.
It is also a good feature for automatic formatting of code to a specific width.
But what about just replacing those \s with ++? It's true it's a few more characters, but is it really that much more work? I actually just used the \s recently, and being 3 characters shorter is a bit nicer, but not that much nicer. And it messed up my simplistic syntax highlighting. However, I did notice that given OverloadedStrings, '"hello " <> "there" :: Text' does not get optimized to 'Text.pack "hello there"', but for all I know the complicated thing it emits is just as efficient.
The same is true for \a, \b, \f, \v, \EM, \DC1, etc. We do need \&, though.
What is \& used for? I never knew it existed until I reread that bit of the report, and couldn't figure out what it was for. I'm assuming that only terminal manipulation stuff needs those things, and that you would generally not want to write it inline, but write something like 'ringyDingy "I'm going to nag and bell at you!"', and ringyDingy is just as happy to build the bell with Char.chr. I guess this is pretty much bike-sheddery so I'll leave it at this, but it seems like the darker corners should be subject to some spring cleaning every 10 years or so...