On Tue, 23 Apr 2013, Gabriela Gibson wrote:
Also, a minor design nit (sorry, no code review): The "---f1"
construct is something I've never seen before.
That's why I picked it --- I checked extensively, and no-one
uses a triple dash, so it does exactly what we hope it
will: never interfere with anything that people might do. Also,
I think it looks quite 'unixy' and it's easy to read. I expect
fewer problems on windows.
Speaking as somebody who might use this feature, I would much
prefer a more familiar notation like "%(f1)". To my eyes, "---f1"
does not look unixy or easy to read; familiar constructs are
easier to read than unfamiliar constructs.
In addition to the familiarity issue, there's an issue with
escapes: you need a way of representing a literal "---f1" sequence
that does not expand to anything. With notation like "%(f1)"
there's already a widespread convention of using "%%" to represent
a "%" character that does not introduce an expnsion.
--apb (Alan Barrett)
