CoCoA » CoCoA-5

The soln in thmproving.cpkg5 was to have a long succession of PrintLn commands:

  PrintLn "DESCRIPTION";
  PrintLn "";
  PrintLn "Given a putative theorem in Euclidean geometry, we introduce Cartesian";
  PrintLn "coordinates in the Euclidean plane, and translate the hypotheses and the...";

But in CoCoA-4 it was permitted to have newlines inside strings (more a curse than a mixed blessing).
With concatenation by juxtaposition, we could have something like:

  PrintLn "DESCRIPTION\n" 
          "\n" 
          "Given a putative theorem in Euclidean geometry, we introduce Cartesian\n" 
          "coordinates in the Euclidean plane, and translate the hypotheses and the...";

Is this a good idea?

I did also on one occasion actually want to have a long string literal... forgotten precisely why.
UPDATE I think I wanted to read in a large polynomial (e.g. 1Mbyte long), and it was inconvenient in Emacs to have such a long line (because Emacs becomes slow with long lines).

The relevant source code is around line 2100 in Parser.C, in the function Parser::parsePrimary.

Another possible justification for wanting to re-allow string literal juxtaposition is that we now have a fold function which can break a long string into pieces separated by newlines. The juxtaposition trick would make it easier to read in such a split string.

Why did I write in comment 1 that this is a "curse"? What problems does it cause?
I suppose a user could make the mistake to forget a comma after a string literal in a list of string literals then CoCoA will silently concatenate the literals.
Here is an example:

L := ["one" "two", "three"];

Or maybe string literal concatenation could be achieved by a special operator symbol? If so, what? (maybe &, ampersand)

Comments, ideas, suggestions?

Another point in favour of ConcatStr is that it could insert newlines between the strings in a list, rather than requiring that the user put in \n explicitly at the end of each string.

println "First line\n" 
        "second line\n"  "last line";

println ConcatStrWithNewlines(
    [ "First line",
      "second line", "last line"]);