PROPOSAL: Templated Construction Expressions (i.e., Expressions Embedded in Strings) (original) (raw)

Per Bothner per at bothner.com
Mon Mar 30 23:34:02 PDT 2009

On 03/30/2009 10:12 PM, rssh at gradsoft.com.ua wrote:

(The proposal to use """ for both open and closing delimiters is very IDE-unfriendly. Imagine trying to do syntax highlighting and checking as the user is entering a program or makes a typo ...)

But IDE-s ara adopted to groovy and scala now. (I.e. netbeans correctly parse and highlight groovy long strings).

The problem is parsing and highlighting programs as they're being edited and that may at any given time be syntactically invalid.

Of course a compiler and an IDE can work with "unfriendly" syntax, but some language syntax is going to be easier than others in terms of error recovery and dealing with partial programs.

What should the IDE do when the uses types:

String x = """|

(where | means the insertion point).

Should the IDE color the rest of the program with the color for strings? That is clearly bad. Should it automatically add the closing terminator, so you get:

String x = """|"""

That's probably the test bet, though perhaps weird. But what if the user points the cursor at the first " and types 6 times? What should the IDE do in between each ?

There are all kinds of pragmatic questions when you have delimited forms, and multi-line strings using """ as both the start and ending delimiter makes it pretty nasty. Through in template expressions that may contain nested string literals and it becomes really nasty.

And all major IDE-s will be adopted to new . So, this argument is not counted.

I'm afraid not.

I have talked with the NetBeans implementors specifically about the syntax of templated and multiline strings in JavaFX. We made changes to the JavaFX syntax at their suggestion/request.

--Per Bothner

per at bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/

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