I take your point, and I really don't want to be the spark of a syntactic flamewar. I suspected I was missing something, and that the $angle_bracketed_format wa

I take your point, and I really don't want to be the spark of a syntactic flamewar. I suspected I was missing something, and that the $angle_bracketed_format was older, but I was searching the wrong things. It seems to me, though, that escaping is just something that's going to be tricky everywhere, and a decent first line solution, wherever you are, is to have a really rare set of characters represent your begin/end string marks. In Python, """text""", Postgres has $$text$$, non-ASCII characters in other formats. XML and sexps are both susceptible to that issue-- both of their escapes are, themselves, escapable. To either one, if you have a subregion that's likely to be unintentionally escaped, then you create a boundary where you either explicitly escape every one, or you refuse to acknowledge previously accepted delimiters. As an example, lisps have (quote term) rather than 'term when you're writing macros and concerned with macro-expansion. To your regex point, there are lisps that definitely did awful deeds with that, particularly emacs lisp, but the more recent ones have solutions just like other modern programming languages and markups do. To me the unending escape just kind of seems like a universal bug. While lisp is just as susceptible, lisps have perfectly reasonable ways of treating these problems-- separate, make distinct, and as last resort, escape.