Improve Escape Sequences in String Literals
Opened this issue · 1 comments
Continued from #659.
Currently, the Slice compiler handles escape sequences like NodeJS does.
If it sees a backslash in a string literal, we remove the backslash and the character immediately after it gets kept as a literal character.
For instance: [deprecated("This is bad, use \"Foo\" instead.")]
.
This works perfectly for the two cases Slice cares about: \"
-> "
and \\
-> \
,
and is consistent with how we support escaping keywords for identifiers: \struct
-> struct
.
But it leaves other cases that might be surprising to some users:
\n
-> n
(instead of a newline character)
\p
-> p
(it's useless to escape p here)
Should we emit an error/warning when users do this explaining the Slice behavior?
Or should we alter the Slice behavior to handle these differently?
I think the current behavior is fine (NodeJS does it, and it's consistent with identifiers),
but I open this issue to discuss alternatives.
I think in the future we should add a lint for this: UnnecessaryCharacterEscape
(by default it'd be a warning).
This solves the problem of a user typing \n
and being surprised not to get a newline.
Now they'll see this warning telling them how escaping works.
Also, I just think the lint is correct. Typing Hell\o
is literally pointless in Slice.
The only characters that need escaping are "
and \
. Escaping anything should be a warning IMO.
(with a little thing saying: note: To type a literal backslash character, you must escape it using '\\'
)
Or, maybe we could broaden this even further and have a lint: UnnecessaryEscapeCharacter
.
And issue warnings for what I talked about above, and for things like:
struct \MyStruct {}
Again, this isn't incorrect to do, but it's completely useless.
So it might be good to issue warnings for these kinds of things too.