[fpc-pascal] Feature "Multiline strings" added

[Pierre Muller]

Le 28/07/2025 à 10:07, Michalis Kamburelis via fpc-pascal a écrit :
> Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>> Personally, I prefer the backtick solution.
>> The triple quote is slow, it requires postprocessing the string.
>> The backtick solution needs only one pass.
>>
>> <rant>
>> I positively HATE it when people start treating whitespace as
>> significant. No YAML or Python for me on that account alone.
>> The triple quote solution (presumably Python inspired)
>> is a totally braindead and retarded solution as far as I am concerned.
>> </rant>
>>
>> You can guess from that little rant that I myself will certainly not
>> remove or even deprecate the backtick version.
>>
>> If having one soluton for all is the norm, we need to remove a lot more
>> things from FPC that Delphi did differently than we do. We don't do that either.
>> Compatibility, yes. But that should not prevent us from doing things our own
>> way from time to time.
>>
>> The solution is simple:
>> if you don't like the backticks, don't use them.
>>
> 
> I can see how this can get into a heated discussion (hopefully it will
> not!) :) You have the last word when it comes to FPC decisions,
> obviously. Still, let me try to present the case for "deprecate
> backticks" again.
> 
> The problem with your solution """if you don't like the backticks,
> don't use them.""" -> is that it means we have 2 ways to achieve the
> same thing in the Pascal language, to the end of time, and users
> *will* get confused about them and we have 2x more work to explain it.
> Things like indentation, crlf/native/etc., what happens with last line
> -> they have now 2 different behaviors, and people who work with
> various Pascal code (Pas2js, FPC, Delphi) will need to grok them both
> and remember which {$xxx} affects which. This makes things harder --
> to document, to teach, and to not confuse ourselves when reading alien
> code.

   I think that a possible solution would be to allow to restrict the mode switch to allow
only triple-quote or only backquote delimiter.

The idea is simply to add:
{$modeswitch multilinestrings triplequote}
and
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}



It is then probably legitimate to also add:
{$modeswitch multilinestrings all}
{$modeswitch multilinestrings none}

Delphi mode can then use
{$modeswitch multilinestrings triplequote}

by default, which means that back-quote will still be refused by the compiler,
unless explicit
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}
or
{$modeswitch multilinestrings all}

is used.

pas2js code using back-quote would then need an explicit
{$ifdef FPC}
{$modeswitch multilinestrings backquote}
{$endif FPC}
to get the compiler to accept that syntax...

Michael, would that be OK for the Pas2js part?

In the hope this can be acceptable by all.

Pierre