Dear Clojure group and developers,
In a recent discussion on #clojure it was pointed out that another
language called newLISP has an excellent feature that would be neat to
adopt into clojure, namely its special text delimiters {} and [text][/
text]. It uses these delimiters to specify verbatim text (i.e. what's
in the parens is *exactly* what the string is, including the newlines).
This feature makes it incredibly easy to write and include various
bits of text in the language such as example code, html, and it makes
writing regular expressions simple by avoiding the need for some
escapes.
For example (newLISP code):
(replace {"quoted" text} my-str {"quoted" string})
vs
(replace "\"quoted\" text" my-str "\"quoted\" string})
As this has numerous advantages we discussed how such a construct
could be brought in to the benefit of Clojure, as in Clojure both the
{} and [] characters are reserved.
The following candidates were considered and rejected for various
reasons:
<> ; rejected because conflicts with statements like (< x 1)
#"" ; rejected because represents regex
#[] ; rejected because implies some sort of data structure like sets,
#{}
[t][/t]; rejected because conflicts with arrays
Finally we agreed that #s{ ... } would make a nice fit, as it fits
nicely with clojure's existing syntax and tendency to use the sharp to
signify a shorthand for something. On irc 'Chousuke' pointed out that
this construct could be used to make it easier to write doc strings
that include sample code for Clojure's functions, but of course there
are many other uses for such a construct (which I should note exists
in many other languages as well, even bash, but I referenced newLISP
as it's also a lisp and has a particularly elegant implementation).
Any and all input is welcome on this proposal!
Kind regards and thanks in advance for taking this into consideration,
Greg (irc: itistoday)
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