single-line string?
spir
denis.spir at gmail.com
Thu Apr 14 07:49:58 PDT 2011
Hello,
This may be a feature request for a single-line string syntactic form --if ever
others are annoyed as well, see below. One possible form may be:
str = s"abc";
I have myself long found it stupid to separate single- and multi-line string,
since there is no formal reason for that. But there are practical consequences
on code edition I did not imagine until I started coding in a language not
making this distinction... namely D.
Problem:
In my editor, Geany, each time I press '"', the whole code (actually the rest
of the code from the current cursor position) is re-scanned, re-interpreted,
re-displayed. This is fully logical and in itself is not a major issue in Geany
because it is very light & fast. I wonder how this goes with heavier editors or
real IDEs.
But the real point is that this causes a big usability problem, namely that all
(the rest of) code suddenly gets unfolded! If I want to go on editing
comfortably, I then need to refold all and manually re-unfold the part(s) I'm
currently working on. Very annoying. Imagine a debugging session requiring
debug prints here & there...
This is a bug of the editor, indeed, but since Geany is based on Scintilla's
editon component, I guess this bug may be widely shared. A solution may be that
opening of a (possibly multi-line) string should limit the reinterpretation
scope to the current logical line, or simply suspend it, until either the
string is closed, or said line is quit (via arrows or mouse). Also, the bug
happens even if I use Geany's feature of auto-closing delimiters, meaning when
I press '"' '""' is written out (a feature I hate anyway for code edition). I
would like to know how & how well other editors deal with all of that
(especially but not only emacs and vim).
Compare with multi-line comments: the difference is double: (1) there is syntax
for single-line comment (2) the closing delimiter is different ('/*' vs '*/').
This means that (1) use of multi-line syntax is limited to actual need for
multi-line (2) one can avoid the bug by writing the closing delimiter first,
hehe! (what I constantly do when writing docs docs)
Any comment ot hint welcome.
Denis
--
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vita es estrany
spir.wikidot.com
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