patch: C-style string lexing
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- Subject: patch: C-style string lexing
- From: "Eric Tetz" <erictetz@...>
- Date: 2008年1月30日 17:06:29 -0800
I just posted a small patch to the wiki that allows C-style string lexing,
where string literals separated by whitespace are collected as a single
string. I've always appreciated that in C, and miss it when using languages
that don't lex strings that way (lika Java or Lua).
For instance, if you have a code block like:
if something then
for k,v in pairs(foo) do
if v then
bar()
else
io.write "This is a big chunk of text "
"that for whatever reason (typically "
"readability) is broken into multiple "
"lines in the source code.\n"
end
end
You can format strings this way now using concatenation, but that has
performance costs. Doing it during lexing is essentially free.
It's also a useful alternative to long strings in some situations because:
1) it allows you to use regular string escape patterns, so you can embed
control characters, control EOL format, etc.
2) it doesn't force you to left-justify the text in your source (which
usually messes up your indentation ^_^)
Anyway, I only wanted to mention it here because it would be nice to see it in
the Lua core. It's a minimal change to the lexer with no real downside (as far
as I can tell). It just gives you a bit more freedom in how you can
format string
literals.
Patch is here (scroll to bottom):
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaPowerPatches
Cheers,
Eric