Re: [PATCH] Interpret #r"..." as a raw string

[Daniel Brooks]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>     textmodes/reftex-vars.el
>>     564:      \"\\\\\\\\begin{eqnarray}\\\\|\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\" works for 
>> eqnarrays.
>
> And this would be:
>
>      564:      "\\\\begin{eqnarray}\\|\\\\\\\\" works for eqnarrays.
>
> While it's clearly a bit better, it's clearly no silver bullet.
>
>> Look at that! 19 backslashes followed by a double–quote. That’s just
>> stupid.
>
> The new version has fewer backslashes, but I'm not sure it'd be few
> enough to get below the threshold for "stupid".
>
>> I think the benefits would add up pretty quickly.
>
> I'm not convinced.

So what you're saying is that because there are multiple layers of
escaping involved, we can't improve any one of those layers because it
doesn't eliminate the problem?

I say that halving the number of backslashes in cases like this is a
good thing, and very much worth the minor incremental cost of a few
dozen lines of extra code.

db48x