Well, I believe that there is no such design that can really obviate the need for a general escape mechanism.
well, yeah. what about unicode, btw? After all, we are not living in the 1990s anymore ...
How about _strings_ too? we are not living in the 1950s anymore... :-)
well... use a professional programming language, if you need strings ... your answer would be ruby, kjetils answer would be scheme, my answer would be python
... t