I think I've spent enough time on this discussion, so I won't be directly responding to any of your recent points -- it's clear that I'm not persuading you that there's any justification for any behaviour for escape sequences other than the way C++ deals with them. That's your prerogative, of course, but I've done enough tilting at windmills for this week, so I'll just make one final comment and then withdraw from an unproductive argument. (I will make an effort to read any final comments you wish to make, so feel free to reply. Just don't expect an answer to any questions.)
Douglas, you and I clearly have a difference of opinion on this. Neither of us have provided even the tiniest amount of objective, replicable, reliable data on the error-proneness of the C++ approach versus that of Python. The supposed superiority of the C++ approach is entirely subjective and based on personal opinion instead of quantitative facts. I prefer languages that permit anything that isn't explicitly forbidden, so I'm happy that Python treats non-special escape sequences as valid, and your attempts to convince me that this goes against the Zen have entirely failed to convince me. As I've done before, I will admit that one consequence of this design is that it makes it hard to introduce new escape sequences to Python. Given that it's vanishingly rare to want to do so, and that wanting to add backslashes to strings is common, I think that's a reasonable tradeoff. Other languages may make different tradeoffs, and that's fine by me. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
