DIP 1027---String Interpolation---Community Review Round 1

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 12/14/19 3:36 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/11/2019 11:33 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> 2) The previous example does bring up another issue: is there a nice way
>> to handle long interpolated strings, i.e., wrap long interpolated
>> strings to multiple lines?  I.e., does the following work?
>>
>>     database.exec(i"UPDATE %table SET key=%key, value=%{f}value "~
>>             "WHERE index < %{d}index AND "~
>>             "timestamp > %{D}lastTime");
> 
> No. The trouble happens with how semantic analysis is done - leaves 
> first, then non-leaves. It's just the wrong order to make the 
> concatenation make sense.

What if the strings are all interpolated strings? e.g.:

database.exec(i"UPDATE %table SET key=$key, value=${f}value "~
			i"WHERE index < ${d}index AND "~
			i"timestamp > ${D}lastTime");

I don't know enough about the grammar/implementation to know if this 
makes more sense or not.

> 
> I've thought about this for the last week. The most practical idea is to 
> simply concatenate adjacent strings, as in:
> 
>    database.exec(i"UPDATE %table SET key=%key, value=%{f}value "
>                    "WHERE index < %{d}index AND "
>                    "timestamp > %{D}lastTime");

But we deprecated that because it's too error prone.

> I.e. the 'i' string comes first, and gets concatenated with any 
> following string literals. This also enables using 'q' strings as 
> interpolated strings:
> 
>      i"" q{a + b}

I actually think 'i' should be able to go before any string literal.
e.g.:

iq{$a + $b}
i`$a + $b`

Just like suffixes can be applied to any string literal to alter the width.

-Steve