in reply to Re: Single quoting weirdness
in thread Single quoting weirdness

I have never found the reason for the first exception to be obvious.

Perl has enough quoting mechanisms that I think it would be more valuable to have one that makes it easy to include a row of backslashes in than it is to have every one able to put out any possible text you could want.

Heck, just the fact that the rules for single-quoting are so widely understood (as can be seen from people wondering at what it does) strongly suggests that something is wrong with the rule as it stands.

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Re: Single quoting weirdness
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jun 07, 2002 at 12:07 UTC
    Escaping the escape character seems to be used in about any escaping mechanism that I can recall. That's hardly a Perl specific thing. And not being about to escape the delimiter is just very awkward. Do you like stuff like: 
        echo '$foo'"'"'$bar'

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    just to be able to echo 
        $foo'$bar

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    like you have to do in many shells?

    Abigail

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      Do I like that? Nope. But if shells were like Perl, then I could do either of the following: 
      echo q($foo'$bar)
echo "\$foo'\$bar"

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      and I find the former in particular to be very convenient. If there was only one quote delimiter to choose from, well that is a pain. But with the range of choices in Perl, it is pretty rare to run across a single-quote situation that wouldn't work easily.

      OTOH there is no syntax in Perl that gives you a row of backslashes easily. And given the way the rest of Unix works, I often want exactly that (just to pass a single backslash through several layers of interpolation - each of which loses half of them).

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