Re: Drop here docs altogether? (was Re: RFC 111 (v3) Here Docs Terminators (Was Whitespace and Here Docs))

[Peter Scott]

At 10:52 AM 9/14/00 -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:

>Actually, to me this thread underscores how broken here docs are
>themselves. We already have q//, qq//, and qx// which duplicate their
>functions far more flexibly. Question: Do we really need here docs?

I have thought this before, but I think the answer is yes, for the 
circumstance of when the quoted material does or may contain the terminator 
character.  No matter what you pick, you still only have one character as a 
terminator, and if you're quoting something big and sufficiently general 
(think Perl code), then it's a pain to check it each time to see if you've 
stuck in the terminator by mistake.

At any rate, this is what I tell my students when they realize that "..." 
can contain newlines and start to wonder about the raison d'etre of here 
documents.

>I think I'd actually much rather see a new qh// "quoted here doc"
>operator that solves these problems than trying to jam them all into the
>existing shell-like syntax, which is a leftover oddity, really.

--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies