Re: Raw string literals in Emacs lisp.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Matthew Plant writes:

 > Although this data is convincing in some respects, I would like to note
 > that xemacs is dead.

The reports of the death of XEmacs are premature.

 > The download off their main page did not even have any
 > raw string literals.

XEmacs 21.4 will never have them.

Of course almost all of the uses of raw strings are for regexps.  Most
non-regexp strings don't use string escapes, except for the occasional
TAB or LF.  Format strings use an alternative operator character %, so
don't have the problem of string escape colliding with the operator
character.

Sure, you can do a lot for readability as PCRE or Python regexps have
done, but regexps are unreadable almost by design, and those regexp
syntaxes benefit from rawstrings, too.  Almost anything (that doesn't
involve changing the meaning of existing legal programs) that improves
readability of regexps is worthwhile.

Rawstrings are cheap and effective.