[Rd] [WISH / PATCH] possibility to split string literals across multiple lines

Hadley Wickham
Wed, 14 Jun 2017 14:51:24 -0000

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 8:48 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
> As I recall this has been discussed at least a few times (unfortunately
I'm traveling so can't check the references), but the justification was
never satisfactory.
>
> Personally, I wouldn't mind string continuation supported since it
makes for more readable code (I had one of my packages raise a NOTE in examples
because there is no way in R to split a long hash into multiple lines), but I
would be strongly against random removal of whitespaces as it's
counter-intuitive, misleading and makes it impossible to continue spaces on the
next line. None of the languages that I can think of with multiline strings do
that as that's way too dangerous.

Julia does, but uses triple quotes:
https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/manual/strings/#triple-quoted-string-literals

Hadley

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