Trying to summarise this discussion, I would say there is an underlying tension between people who:
- Think these strings will be rare, so are happy with some semi-verbose to verbose marker (
#rawString,#rawStringLiteral,#stringLiteralWithoutEscaping(customDelimiter:, …), several dozen quotation marks in a row plus the string has to be multi-line, etc). - Think that these strings will be common, so want a concise marker (
r"…",\"…",'…', etc).
#raw is probably somewhere in the middle there, but it's unclear if that puts it in the Goldilocks zone or no man's land.
As noted by several people, including the author, the original proposal didn't really do itself any favours here because it lacked good examples, especially since it's generally agreed that regular expressions deserve special attention of another form. The updated proposal has some more examples, which are somewhat helpful, but aren't really definitive for me.
A related issue is the question of how many special string forms Swift should have. If you want several more, then a syntax that generalises would be preferred (e.g. verbose: #specialString(arguments:…), concise: r"…", s"…", t"…", …). If you think raw strings are about the last form needed then something simpler will suffice (e.g. verbose: #rawString(…), concise: \"…", '…' if it's not reserved for character-like things).