On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:35:38 -0400, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> said:

> Vassil Nikolov scripsit:
>> For example (it is a rare case, but I have encountered it), when
>> generating literal strings programmatically and not having a way
>> to determine what character is inserted in the generated value,
>> it is convenient to simply precede the unknown character with the
>> escape character and rest assured that the string literal will always
>> be well-formed.

> We actually don't do that, and for this reason:  If it was guaranteed that
> \q meant the same as q, it would be impossible to give \q a meaning in
> some future version of the language.  Therefore, we say that \q is
> undefined, so that it can be treated by an implementation as an error,
> as q, or as something new in advance of future standardization.

  ---When the same character is overloaded to be both an escape
  character and a prefix indicating a special meaning of what follows,
  yes.  I was just saying that the other trade-off also has some
  merit; I fully realize that this is (most likely) "academic".

  ---Vassil.

--
Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николов | <vnikolov@pobox.com>

"Be careful how you fix what you don't understand."  (Brooks 2010, 185)

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