HEREDOCS are okay but they can really screw up indenting if you have them in a block. You can use a number of different delimiters for the q* operators. Basically anything with a matching something, like (), [], {}, you can also use |, ~, #, !, *, geesh, a lot of things. I guess anything that doesn't make it look like a different function/operator (so qq9 something 9; won't work). The regular ones get highlighted properly in most text editors, but even vim gets tripped up on the weirder ones.