The message below gives the context for this diatribe.
A perl script is probably written in a particular language, probably for
users of that language, possibly for users of a second language. Unless
there are lots of I18N type features added into Perl to allow extracting
all string constants from the language (which, in a text processing
language, or at least for multitudes of text processing scripts, would be
extremely hard), these one or two languages are it.
Now the use of one, or worse, several Unicode character outside the
bounds of those two languages as a choice of delimiter might seem to be a
clever idea, but really it is not. The use of such characters presumes
that all the consumers of the script (those that read it, not run it)
must have installed fonts containing the appropriate glyph for that
character, otherwise it will probably appear as a "splotch" in their
editor. It is not at all clear that the various splotches will be
visually distinguishable in such an editor. An editor like Emacs would
render them in octal, which is visually distinguishable, but rather gross
to view.
Stick with characters in the normal character set of the author of the
script, except for forays into the language of the users of the script.
John Porter wrote:
> Glenn Linderman wrote:
> > >
> > > qc( Here's a quick comment which actually contains
> > > qc( another comment )
> > > within it
> > > );
> >
> > This type of comment will not comment out arbitrary text.
> > In particular, it might have problems with text containing
> > mismatched (){}<>.
>
> This is already an issue with the existing q.() operators --
> which is to say, I don't think it's something we need to worry about.
> That's not to say that we shouldn't have multi-char q.() delimiters;
> being able to say qq({ }) might be nice, for example.
>
> Also consider the impact of Unicode, which will allow any reasonable
> pair of matching Unicode characters. I.e. instead of multi-char,
> think wide-char.
>
> > And yet using non-paired
> > delimiters doesn't allow commenting out comments.
>
> Since what I think this means is false, you probably mean
> something else...
>
> --
> John Porter
--
Glenn
=====
There are two kinds of people, those
who finish what they start, and so
on... -- Robert Byrne
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