[Bug 29360] Extending string literal syntax

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=29360

Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |liam@w3.org

--- Comment #10 from Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> ---
Benito, the W3C actually uses a consensus process, and voting is only used if
agreement cannot be reached. Even then there's a procedure for objections.

My original proposal used @{....@} (it had to be at least two characters
because of the way some implemntations parse XPath) with ${ exprsingle }
interpolated inside.

But there were objections to ${...} because people thought ${ $foo } looked odd
and because of {$foo} being special in XSLT.

I'd especially wanted to be able to include multiline CSS, JSON and JavaScript
fragments in these string literals and others accepted that use case, so we
tried to use delimiters that were not often found there (that's why I'd used
@{..} originally in fact).

The final syntax isn't ideal, although arguably it's better than the <<EOF and
<<'EOF' used in the Unix shell (and hence Perl). My very first proposal was
based on that, in fact, so you supplied the end delimiter each time, but some
implementers had serious difficulties integrating that so I had to back off.

It's not that the committee was on crack (for what it's worth Mike Kay opposed
the feature altogether more than once before being persuaded, so his comment
about exhaustion may partly come from that initial reluctance). It's that basic
syntax features can be hard to add several years after the main design of a
language was frozen.

By the way, as I said to you at Balisage, if you want to participate we'd be
delighted, although I fear there probably won't be an XQuery 3.2.

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Received on Thursday, 7 January 2016 21:46:38 UTC