[Info-vax] Coding style in the VMS's

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, October 1, 2021 at 2:21:45 AM UTC+13, osuv... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 1:38:06 AM UTC-4, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>
>> On Thursday, September 30, 2021 at 1:11:35 PM UTC+13, Bill Gunshannon wrote: 
>>
>>> I doubt anyone still wants Hollerith constants. 
>>
>> I remember in my younger days thinking how neat they were. You could have any
>> (printable, at least) characters you liked in the string, no escaping conventions
>> necessary.
>
> I still think they are neat, and wish SQL supported it.

Given that you need escaping for non-printable characters, I suppose the loss in requiring them for quote characters as well (and the escape character itself) is small.

I can imagine people getting fed up with the tedium of counting how many characters were in their literals. Though I suppose having coding forms with numbered columns made this easier. And in Emacs, I can select the text and type alt-equals to find out exactly how many characters it contains.

On the flip side, you then have some fun when nesting one language in another. I once wrote some Python code which was outputting a web page with embedded JavaScript that was in turn generating further dynamic page content. I had up to seven backslashes in a row in places.