Pure Bikeshedding: Raw Strings (why yes, again!)

[huon (Huon Wilson)]

I think the point in this comment is an important one for considering syntax; quoted here:

Any raw string literal syntax with fixed delimiters has the problem that you can’t escape the delimiter. I’d prefer a design where the delimiter can be user-specified, so that anything can be embedded verbatim within a literal without escaping. There’s lots of precedent for this—C++ has r"DELIMITER( )DELIMITER", Postgres has $DELIMITER$ $DELIMITER$, Ruby and Perl have their q operators which accept almost any following punctuator, shell has <<HERE\n .... HERE, and so on. I don’t have a particular preference to which approach we take, but I think a user-controllable delimiter should be a requirement.

I'll also add to those examples that Rust uses r#"..."#, where there can be any^ (including 0) number of #s. The typical case is r"...", but if the string includes a " then one can use r#"..."..."#, and if it includes "#, then r##"..."#..."##, etc. This strikes a middle ground of avoiding the unescapable-delimiter problem while still having a moderate amount of structure. The "RFC" proposing it for Rust has an even more comprehensive overview of other languages.

^ (I think there's actually a limit, but I believe it's so large enough that it's unlikely anyone would encounter it in code where using a raw string is a good idea.)