[fpc-devel] Some thoughts on multi-line string support, and a possible syntax that I think is perfectly clean and Pascal-ish.

[Sven Barth]

Am 04.07.2019 um 01:57 schrieb J. Gareth Moreton:
>
> While I like the idea in principle, one thing that I'm a bit worried 
> about is how whitespace is handled, like what counts for a leading or 
> trailing space in the string when between lines, since Pascal parsers 
> (and those for many other languages) traditionally, I believe, discard 
> everything following the last non-whitespace character in a line.  
> Also, with the backtick suggestion, what should one do if they wish to 
> include a control character (e.g. a linefeed) or the backtick 
> character itself?
>
Whitespace is indeed an important point. I myself pay quite some 
attention to nice identation and with multiline strings that will 
probably break:

=== code begin ===

const SomeString = `Whatever
                                      bar
                                      blubb
                                      foobar`;

=== code end ===

That's how I also inline my normal multiline strings that I separate 
with sLineBreak. However to get the same result with this proposed new 
feature I'd have to do this:

=== code begin ===

const SomeString = `Whatever
bar
blubb
foobar`;

=== code end ===

Which looks just ugly.

And let's not forget that such strings can also be used inside code 
sequences, cause it wouldn't make sense to restrict them just to constants:

=== code begin ===

var
   s: string;
begin
   if somecondition then
     s := `Some
Multiline
String`
    else
     s := `Some
other
Multiline
String`;
end.

=== code end ===

Even if one would say that the whitespace at the start of a line is 
discarded that wouldn't make everyone happy, cause then code like the 
example Ben showed in his mail from today wouldn't work:

=== code begin ===

const Help = `Help:
   -h:
     Show this help.
   -i:
     Print the letter i for no reason.
`;

=== code end ===

So yes, I'm still against this feature.

Regards,
Sven