Disallow newlines in strings

[brson]

From LWN:

The modern trend seems to be to disallow literal newlines inside quoted strings, so that missing quote characters can be quickly detected by the compiler or interpreter. Go follows this trend and, like D, uses the back quote (rather than the Python triple-quote) to surround "raw" strings in which escapes are not recognized and newlines are permitted. Rust bucks the trend by allowing literal newlines in strings and does not provide for uninterpreted strings at all.

Is detecting missing quote characters important? We may already want raw strings so perhaps there's there's no need to 'buck the trend' here.

[bstrie]

I agree that we need raw strings, but that's no reason to disallow newlines in normal strings.

Firstly, it's such an unlikely error that crippling strings just to prevent it is silly.

Secondly, any editor with syntax highlighting (read: 99.9999996% of all editors) will immediately make this error apparent. Rob Pike may abhor syntax highlighting, but we have no such aversion.

Thirdly, we already give a good error here:

fn main() {
    let c = "foo;
    let d = "bar";
}

nl.rs:3:13: 3:16 error: unterminated double quote string: ";
}
nl.rs:3     let d = "bar";
                     ^~~

[bstrie]

Also note that restricting newlines to raw strings would mean that we wouldn't be able to use \ to gobble up whitespace, as we do currently. Rust's support for newlines in strings is awesome, don't mess it up! :)

[msullivan]

I tend to agree with @bstrie here.

[SiegeLord]

The LWN article is wrong about D, as it does allow literal newlines inside all of the string literals it supports.

[jesseray]

When I use strings, ~90% of the time I want normal (i.e., non-raw) strings that support newlines. I do not want to rewrite huge swathes of code to use raw strings in order to have the compiler respect my decision to hit the Enter key. That would drive me batty.

[emberian]

We have raw strings. We have newlines. I don't think anything needs to change.

[emberian]

(Nominating)

[pnkfelix]

notabug! closing!