Design #576
Disallow juxtaposition for string literals?
Description
Currently CoCoA-5 accepts juxtaposed string literals (i.e. separated by nothing or white space).
Can we remove this "feature? What was the original reason for wanting this? Is it still valid?
Related issues
History
#1
Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti almost 10 years ago
Updated by Can we remove this "feature? What was the original reason for wanting this?
The original reason was to allow it because it exists in C/C++.
Was not a cocoa-4 valid syntax.
Remove it!
#2
Updated by John Abbott almost 10 years ago
Updated by - Status changed from New to In Progress
- Assignee set to John Abbott
- % Done changed from 0 to 20
I believe the relevant source is in Parser.C lines 2095-2103 inclusive.
I'll try commenting out, and see if everything still works...
#3
Updated by John Abbott almost 10 years ago
- % Done changed from 20 to 60
I tried; it compiled and all tests pass. Will test more tomorrow, and then check in.
#4
Updated by John Abbott almost 10 years ago
Here is a possible reason for wanting to allow juxtaposition of strings: if an input includes a very long string literal, that literal could be split over several lines. The unification of the literals occurs inside the parser -- there is no run-time cost (but then who would put a large string literal inside a loop???) unlike an explicit use of + to concatenate them at run-time.
However, I cannot think of any plausible situation where CoCoA-5 code might want to have very long string literals. Conversely, an input with very long integer literals is quite likely, but we have no mechanism for splitting those!
All in all, it really does seem to be a "useless" feature...
#5
Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti almost 10 years ago
All in all, it really does seem to be a "useless" feature...
and was not in CoCoA-4. It's a pointless exception.
#6
Updated by John Abbott almost 10 years ago
- Status changed from In Progress to Closed
- % Done changed from 60 to 100
If there were any serious problems, they'd have come to light by now (almost 24 hours of testing!)
Closing.
#7
Updated by John Abbott almost 8 years ago
- Related to Slug #875: Interpreter is too slow reading a big polynomial added
#8
Updated by John Abbott about 4 years ago
- Related to Feature #1431: Juxtaposition of string literals added