On Sun, Nov 20, 2005 at 01:26:21AM +0100, Juerd wrote:
: Ruud H.G. van Tol skribis 2005-11-20 1:19 (+0100):
: > Maybe
: > "\x{123a 123b 123c}"
: > is a nice alternative of
: > "\x{123a} \x{123b} \x{123c}".
:
: Hmm, very cute and friendly! Can we keep it, please? Please?
We already have, from A5, \x[0a;0d], so you can supposedly say
"\x[123a;123b;123c]"
Note that square brackets are now the normative style though, since we're
trying to reserve curlies psychologically for closures.
But I see that the semicolon is rather cluttery, mainly because it's
too tall. I'm not sure going all the way to space is good, but we
might have
"\x[123a,123b,123c]"
just to get a little visual space along with the separator. My problem
with space is that it has potential visual confusion with character
classes (especially with the square brackets), and it also will make
people wonder whether :w should match optional whitespace between
the characters. The commas seems to imply sequence to me, and they
occur often enough that you can see it's not a well-formed character
class, insofar as it has repeated characters.
It occurs to me that we didn't spec whether character classes ignore
whitespace. They probably should, just so you can chunk things:
/ <[ a..z A..Z 0..9 _ ]> /
Then the question arises about whether <[ \ ]> is an escaped space
or a backslash, or illegal But if we make it match a backslash
or illegal, then the minimal space matcher becomes \x20, I think,
unless you graduate to \s. On the other hand, if we make it match
a space, people aren't going to read that way unless they're pretty
sophisticated...
Larry
