Since you had to pick a contrived example, that suggests the problem isn't particularly common. If it was "real" enough, you wouldn't need a contrived example.

Since you had to pick a contrived example, that suggests the problem isn't particularly common. If it was "real" enough, you wouldn't need a contrived example. > and, in the article, is directly responsible for a bug. Nope! It was not responsible for anything whatsoever. Yeah, the backslashes got escaped, but they were already broken, so it didn't actually break anything. All it did was make "btest" match instead of "\x08test" match (both of which are equally buggy, though "btest" is more likely to be triggered in the wild). > Are you really arguing that we could make C less confusing by switching printf("%d", x) to printf("\\d", x)? No. I did not say that at all, and I don't appreciate straw man arguments. > I'd say that C strings and C format directives use different escape characters specifically because they're likely to be used together I doubt it. Neither of us was present (I'm assuming) when the printf format spec was decided upon, but I'd wager that % was chosen because this has a semantically different meaning than backslash-escapes. Backslash escapes are just that: escapes. They're either stand-ins for certain un-typeable characters, or they disable interpretation of the following character. But % in printf isn't used as a character escape, it's used as a token. It's a stand-in for a more complicated representation of a separate argument. And the fact that it behaves differently than \ does warrants it using a different character. Whereas in other languages, \ typically has the exact same semantic meaning as \ does in C strings (the set of character escapes may vary slightly, although most languages tend to copy C's character escapes verbatim). And that's why they use \. It's the same reason most languages use "" to denote strings, or [] to denote subscripting. It's common punctuation that behaves the same across multiple languages, which makes it easy for the programmer to remember and work with.