On Apr 6, 10:13 am, Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> wrote: > On Apr 5, 9:59 pm, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Apr 6, 6:56 am, Steve Howell <showel...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > > > One of the biggest nuisances for programmers, just beneath date/time > > > APIs in the pantheon of annoyances, is that we are constantly dealing > > > with escaping/encoding/formatting issues. > > > [OT for this list] > > If you run > > $ find /usr/share/emacs/23.3/lisp/ -name '*.gz'|xargs zgrep '\\\\\\\\\\ > > \\\\\\' > > you can get quite a few results. > > > [Suitable assumptions: linux box with emacs installed] > > You've one-upped me with 2-to-the-N backslash escaping. I've written > useful scripts before with "\\\\\\\\" (scripts that went through > three > levels of interpretation), but four is setting a new bar. My use of > three exponentially increasing levels of backslashes back in the day > was like Beamon's jump in the Mexico City Olympics. An amazing feat > for its time, but every record > eventually gets broken. Well done.
There was a competition here?! If so I can break my own record -- double the number of backslashes and you still get hits. Its just that I was unsure of my ability at typing 32 backslashes (and making a reasonable post). On a more serious note this indicates that it is (may be?) a bad idea for old-fashioned languages (like elisp and C) to have only 1 string- quoter. May-be-question-mark because programming language experience tells us that avoiding recursion (in its infinite guises) by special-casing is usually a bad idea. All this mess would vanish if the string-literal-starter and ender were different. [You dont need to escape a open-paren in a lisp sexp] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list