Re: everyone's least favorite creatures

[hanche@ams.sunysb.edu (Harald Hanche-Olsen)]

>>>>> On Mon, 24 May 1993 21:00:50 -0400, haahr@mv.us.adobe.com (Paul Haahr) said:

Paul> Noah wrote, a long time ago
> >what features of the language would you (everyone on the list) remove?

> 7) I have mixed feelings about getting rid of the read syntax for special
>    characters (e.g. `\n').  But I lean toward eliminating them for the sake
>    of simplicity and reliability.

Paul> this is the one piece of es that nobody besides me seems to like
Paul> at all.  the complexity is very small, and it has some real
Paul> advantages if you write scripts which include special
Paul> characters.  i use \n all the time as the first argument to ``.

Please keep it in.  I like it, I like it, I like it too!  I consider
any language broken that will not let me specify arbitrary
characters...

Oh, by the way, as a C programmer I would have expected \0456 and
\045^6 to give the same result, but they don't.  The \ escape just
keeps gobbling all the octal digits it can get.

- Harald