On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 9:26 PM Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> > And what's so special about SQL over, say, regular expressions, XML, > > JSON, YAML, Markdown, ReST, LaTeX, etc? I might want to use the s'' > > prefix for embedded Scheme code rather than SQL. > > Um, regular expressions are not precisely the best example there, since > we do have raw strings specifically for regular expressions. > I mentioned them also in my similar list, but deliberately. *Raw strings* are not per-se for regexen, even if that is one of the more common uses. That said, I wonder why no text editors I know of try special highlighting of `r"..."` strings. We already (often) have that hint that the quoted thing might be a regular expression. Maybe it's just that those patterns are so densely coded that adding colors doesn't really help. Doing a search, the only editor I find easily that seems to highlight regexen is JetBrains Rider. The examples it shows look kinda-sorta useful. Probably someone made a plugin or something that does it elsewhere. Here's another idea that is purely convention, as the comment convention is. Use functions! They are just cruft from a runtime point-of-view, but they provide a really obvious hint to IDEs or other tools: SQL = REGX = XPATH = MD = lambda s: s pat = REGX(r"\$\d{1,10}.\d{2}") sql = SQL("SELECT foo, bar FROM table WHERE baz > 42;") query = XPATH("/bookstore/book[1]/title") These decorations are doing nothing functionally, but they would be easy for any IDE that wanted to to look for. This is completely extensible to any mini-language that might occur in strings. You'd just need some sort of configuration for the editor to know how to look for and highlight each syntax. I kinda like the look of this better than the end of line comment (which gets more complex to figure out with multi-line, triple-quoted strings. The function just handles that automatically. Of course, those functions *could* do something more than identity if they wanted to. > But the rest of the list is still valid. Why is SQL more important than > any other language or text format? I don't think it is. > I might even go so far as saying SQL is more important than any other SINGLE other embedded language. But out of the hundreds, it's nowhere close to a majority. -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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