[erlang-questions] Strings as Lists

Mon Feb 18 22:13:55 CET 2008

Brian Cully wrote:
> On 18-Feb-2008, at 09:49, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> 
>> ~n"...."   turn off quoting
>> ~r"...."    string is a regexp
>> ~x"..."    string is xml
>> ~x/FlunkyStuff ... FunkyStuff  (string is xml terminated by  
>> FunkyStuff)
>> ~myExpander/FunkyStuff .... FunckyStuff
> 
> 	I agree with the difficulty of embedding languages into strings, and  
> avoid it myself whenever possible. Mostly because I'm puritanical, but  
> whatever.
> 
> 	My issue regards overloading the double-quote character. I'd rather  
> something completely generic to avoid situations like this:
> 
> 	~r"/"/"
> 	~xml"<root attr="oops"/>"
> 	and so on.
> 
> 	perl's qr/w/x operators might be worth looking at. They don't  
> completely fix the issue, but they work around it by allowing the  
> programmer to specify delimiters.
> 
> 	Personally, I'd rather just natural syntax. Both regexp and xml  
> naturally terminate or have errors, so switching the parser into an  
> xml/regexp mode seems reasonable to me.

It then becomes a problem to parse the straight HTML, which could
contain JavaScript. The browser is supposed to have similar smarts
in how it treats javascript quoting inside a quoted attribute.
However, this would ask for the order-2 smarts from the erlang parser.

I'd propose something like trac code, which is

{{{literal"string"<xml>, code, etc.}}}

where the number and the shape of braces is debatable. To avoid
confusion with tuples, perhaps 3 angle braces would do. Example:

	<<<<html><head>"some invalid> htmlcode</html>>>>

which parses quite straightforwardly.

-- 
vlm