On Sun, 8 Feb 2009, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Do you have any examples of full-fledged languages that don't have an escaping mechanism?
I used to make rather large programmes using QuickBASIC, which had doublequote-delimited strings in which you could have spaces, but newlines had to be made using a CHR$(13) function call and then concatenated using +.
The equivalent in Pd is more cumbersome because plugging several boxes together is more cumbersome than writing something grammatical, which is why [expr] is used so much, for example. It's also more cumbersome because space is a frequent character but there are very few languages that forbid it in string literals and/or symbols. LOGO (except ColorLOGO) was like this, but had also other features to compensate, that Pd doesn't have.
It can also be a speed issue, but with Pd 0.40, a $1$2$3$4$5$6$7$8$9 message box can do it in one pass, just like how the several [sprintf] externals can do it because they're not limited the way [makefilename] is.
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