> It's exactly the point that this is one token. Fair enough. The point, as you have acknowledged, being that unlike + you have to treat { specially for balanc

> It's exactly the point that this is one token. Fair enough. The point, as you have acknowledged, being that unlike + you have to treat { specially for balancing (and separately from the “). > The fact that people tend to think of `{some_variable}` as an entity is sort-of an illusion. I guess. I just don’t know what being an illusion means formally. It’s not an illusion to the person that has to implement the state machine that balances the delimiters. > You would highlight the `"...{`, `}...{`, and `}..."` parts like normal string literals (they just use curly braces instead of double quotes at one or both ends), and highlight the inner expressions the same as if they weren't surrounded by such literals Emacs does it this way FWIW. But I’m not sure how important it is to dictate that the brace can’t be a different color. In any event, I can agree your design is valid (Kotlin works this way), but I don’t necessarily agree it is any more valid than say how Python does it where there can format specifiers, implicit conversion to string is performed whereas not with concatenation. I’m not seeing the clear definitive advantage of interpolated strings being an equivalent to concatenation vs some other type of method call. The other detail is order of evaluation or sequencing. String concat may behave differently. Not sure I agree it is wrong, because at the end of the day it is distinct looking syntax. Illusion or not, it looks like a neatly enclosed expression, and concatenation looks like something else. That they might parse, evaluate or behave different isn't unreasonable.