Re: [qlang] Q 7.0 character escape syntax (was: Re: [q-lang-users] ANN: Q 7.0 release candidate)

[Andrew B. <an...@vo...>]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:26:31 -0800, Albert Graef <Dr....@t-...>  
wrote:

As an only-occasional user of Q, I'll weigh in with my $.02 here.

>
> I'm not sure what The Right Thing is in this case. So what should we do:  
> Keep the existing \ddd, \0ooo, \0xhhh notation and extend that with the  
> \(<int>) notation? Or rather jump on the C/Python/... bandwagon and  
> employ the widely used \ooo, \xhh, \uhhhh, \Uhhhhhhhh notation? (Note  
> that then I'd also have to slash the decimal escape syntax of pre-7.0  
> releases, potentially breaking existing scripts in places where it might  
> not be easily noticed.) Any other proposals? Opinions?

Is there a good reason to not make the "0" in \0xff just be optional?   
That gets a format that is consistent with the number literals, and a  
shorter--yet still clear--format for people like me who really hate  
senseless redundancy in a syntax.

>
> This convention was adopted from C (I think that the standard doesn't  
> actually specify this, but IIRC all C compilers I've used did it that  
> way). At least the newer versions of gcc generate a warning message in  
> the case of an unrecognized escape, though. I could easily do this in  
> the Q compiler as well, but unless you run the interpreter with the -w  
> option you won't notice the difference. ;-) OTOH, spitting out a syntax  
> error in this case seems a bit too harsh for my taste. What do others  
> think?

I'd vote for making it an actuall error.  Speaking as one who often has  
trouble remembering if the "bell" is '\b' or '\g' (somehow I _can_  
remember that the bell character is ^g), I would like a  
quicker-than-running-it way to find out that one of them is an  
unrecognized escape.  I can't think of any scenario where the fact that  
some characters can have an ignored '\' prepended to them can be used  
advantageously.  And in the event that I think of one, I hope that someone  
around me cares enough to take my keyboard away and slap some sense into  
me.

-andrew

-- 
an...@vo...