11 ms·

> Raw or multiline strings are spelled like this: const still_raw = \\const raw = \\ \\Roses are red \\ \\ Violets are blue,

• steveklabnik 1y ago
  I had the exact opposite reaction.
• fcoury 1y ago
  I really like zig but that syntax is indeed insane.
• IshKebab 1y ago
  Maybe if you've never tried formatting a traditional multiline string (e.g. in Python, C++ or Rust) before. If it isn't obvious, the problem is that you can't indent them properly because the indentation becomes part of the string itself. Some languages have magical "removed the indent" modes for strings (e.g. YAML) but they generally suck and just add confusion. This syntax is quite clear (at least with respect to indentation; not sure about the trailing newline - where does the string end exactly?).
  • konart 1y ago
    I may be missing something but come Go has a simple: `A simple formatted string ` ?
    • rybosome 1y ago
      Yours is rendered as: A\n\tsimple\n\t\tformatted\n\t\t\tstring\n\t If you wanted it without the additional indentation, you’d need to use a function to strip that out. Typescript has dedent which goes in front of the template string, for example. I guess in Zig that’s not necessary which is nice.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • konart 1y ago
        Okay I get it now. Formatted multiline string in code without an actual formatting and no string concat.
    • xigoi 1y ago
      The problem is that usually you have something like fn main() { if something { print(`A simple formatted string`) } } which looks ugly and confusing.
  • z_open 1y ago
    Even if we ignore solutions other languages have come up with, it's even worse that they landed on // for the syntax given that it's apparently used the same way for real comments.
    • n42 1y ago
      > it's even worse that they landed on // for the syntax .. it is using \\
      • hinkley 1y ago
        I worked with browsers since before most people knew what a browser was and it will never cease to amaze me how often people confuse slash and backslash, / and \ It’s some sort of mental glitch that a number of people fall into and I have absolutely no idea why.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • Twey 1y ago
          I wonder if it's dyslexia-adjacent. Dyslexic people famously have particular difficulty distinguishing rotated and reflected letterforms.
          • hinkley 1y ago
            Could be. The frequency is such that it could be dyslexics. It's not all the time, but it's a steady rate of incidence.
            • quesera 1y ago
              I think in the 90's it was just people repeating a pattern they learned from Windows/DOS. It used to grate on my nerves to hear people say, e.g. "H T T P colon backslash backslash yahoo dot com". But I think they always typed forward slash, like they knew the correct slash to use based on the context, but somehow always spoke it in DOSish.
  • Blackarea 1y ago
    We can just use a crate for that and don't have to have this horrible comment like style that brings its own category of problems. https://docs.rs/indoc/latest/indoc/ https://docs.rs/indoc/latest/indoc/
    • Twey 1y ago
      And what if you do want to include two spaces at the beginning of the block (but not any of the rest of the indentation)? Choice of specific line-start marker aside, I think this is the best solution to the indented-string problem I've seen so far.
      • gf000 1y ago
        I think Java's solution is much cleaner.
        • IshKebab 1y ago
          For those of us that haven't used Java for a decade... > In text blocks, the leftmost non-whitespace character on any of the lines or the leftmost closing delimiter defines where meaningful white space begins. From https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/text-blocks-come-to-java https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/post/text-blocks-come-... It's not a bad option but it does mean you can't have text where every line is indented. This isn't uncommon - e.g. think about code generation of a function body.
          • Twey 1y ago
            Right, this is a pretty common syntax, but doesn't address the same problem as Zig's syntax. I've only seen two that do: the Zig approach, and a postprocessing ‘dedent’ step.
          • gf000 1y ago
            Why couldn't you have it? You just put the ending """ where you want it relative to the content.
  • norir 1y ago
    Significant whitespace is not difficult to add to a language and, for me, is vastly superior than what zig does both for strings and the unnecessary semicolon that zig imposes by _not_ using significant whitespace. I would so much rather read and write: let x = """ a multiline string example """ than let x = //a //multiline string //example ; In this particular example, zig doesn't look that bad, but for longer strings, I find adding the // prefix onerous and makes moving strings around different contexts needlessly painful. Yes, I can automatically add them with vim commands, but I would just rather not have them at all. The trailing """ is also unnecessary in this case, but it is nice to have clear bookends. Zig by contrast lacks an opening bracket but requires a closing bracket, but the bracket it uses `;` is ambiguous in the language. If all I can see is the last line, I cannot tell that a string precedes it, whereas in my example, you can. Here is a simple way to implement the former case: require tabs for indentation. Parse with recursive descent where the signature is (source: string, index: number, indent: number, env: comp_env) => ast Multiline string parsing becomes a matter of bumping the indent parameter. Whenever the parser encounters a newline character, it checks the indentation and either skips it, or if is less than the current indentation requires a closing """ on the next line at a reduced indentation of one line. This can be implemented in under 200 lines of pure lua with no standard library functions except string.byte and string.sub. It is common to hear complaints about languages that have syntactically significant whitespace. I think a lot of the complaints are fair when the language does not have strict formatting rules: python and scala come to mind as examples that do badly with this. With scala, practically everyone ends up using scalafmt which slows down their build considerably because the language is way too permissive in what it allows. Yaml is another great example of significant whitespace done poorly because it is too permissive. When done strictly, I find that a language with significant whitespace will always be more compact and thus, in my opinion, more readable than one that does not use it. I would never use zig directly because I do not like its syntax even if many people do. If I was mandated to use it, I would spend an afternoon writing a transpiler that would probably be 2-10x faster than the zig compiler for the same program so the overhead of avoiding their decisions I disagree with are negligible. Of course from this perspective, zig offers me no value. There is nothing I can do with zig that I can't do with c so I'd prefer it as a target language. Most code does not need to be optimized, but for the small amount that does, transpiling to c gives me access to almost everything I need in llvm. If there is something I can't get from c out of llvm (which seems highly unlikely), I can transpile to llvm instead.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • qzzi 1y ago
    C and Python automatically concatenate string literals, and Rust has the concat! macro. There's no problem just writing it in a way that works correctly with any indentation. No need for weird-strings. " one\n" " two\n" " three\n"
    • drjeats 1y ago
      Personally, I'd rather prefix with `\\` than have to postfix with `\n`. The `\\` is automatically prepended when I enter a newline in my editor after I start a multiline string, much like editors have done for C-style multiline comments for years. Snippet from my shader compiler tests (the `\` vs `/` in the paths in params and output is intentional, when compiled it will generate escape errors so I'm prodded to make everything `/`): test "shader_root_gen" { const expected = \\// Generated file! \\ \\pub const @"spriteszzz" = opaque { \\ pub const @"quadsprite" = @import("src\spriteszzz/quadsprite.glsl"); \\}; \\ \\pub const @"sprites" = opaque { \\ pub const @"universalsprite" = @import("src\sprites/universalsprite.glsl"); \\}; \\ \\pub const @"simpleshader" = @import("src/simpleshader.glsl"); \\ ; const cmdline = \\--prefix src -o testfile.zig src\spriteszzz/quadsprite.glsl src\sprites/universalsprite.glsl src/simpleshader.glsl ; var args_iter = std.mem.tokenizeScalar(u8, cmdline, ' '); const params = try Params.parseFromCmdLineArgs(&args_iter); var buffer: [expected.len * 2]u8 = undefined; var stream = std.io.fixedBufferStream(buffer[0..]); try generateSource(stream.writer().any(), params.input_files.items, params.prefix); const actual = stream.getWritten(); try std.testing.expectEqualSlices(u8, expected, actual); }
• hardwaregeek 1y ago
  My immediate thought was hmm, that's weird but pretty nice. The indentation problem indeed sucks and with a halfway decent syntax highlighter you can probably de-emphasize the `//` and make it less visually cluttered.
• n42 1y ago
  Zig does not really try to appeal to window shoppers. this is one of those controversial decisions that, once you become comfortable with the language by using it, you learn to appreciate. spoken as someone who found the syntax offensive when I first learned it.
• throw10920 1y ago
  It seems very reasonable and comes with several technical and cognitive advantages. I think you're just having a knee-jerk emotional reaction because it's different than what you're used to, not because it's actually bad.
• conorbergin 1y ago
  I think everyone has this reaction until they start using it, then it makes perfect sense, especially when using editors that have multiple cursors and can operate on selections.
• klas_segeljakt 1y ago
  When I first read it I thought it was line comments.
  • watersb 1y ago
    Upvoting because similar comments here suggest that you are not alone. People are having trouble distinguishing between '//' and '\\'.
• rybosome 1y ago
  Visually I dislike the \\, but I see this solves the problem of multiline literals and indentation in a handy, unambiguous way. I’m not actually aware of any other language which solves this problem without a function.
• whitehexagon 1y ago
  I think Kotlin solves it quite nicely with the trimIndent. I seem to recall Golang was my fav, and Java my least, although I think Java also finally added support for a clean text block. Makes cut 'n' paste embedded shader code, assembly, javascript so much easier to add, and more readable imo. For something like a regular expressions I really liked Golang's back tick 'raw string' syntax. In Zig I find myself doing an @embedFile to avoid the '\\' pollution.
• ivanjermakov 1y ago
  It is not the insane syntax, but quite insane problem to solve. Usually, representing multiline strings within another multiline string requires lots of non-trivial escaping. This is what this example is about: no escaping and no indent nursery needed in Zig.
• conaclos 1y ago
  I like the idea of repeating the delimiter on every line. However `//` looks like a comment to me. I could simply choose double quote: const still_raw = "const raw = " "Roses are red " " Violets are blue, " "Sugar is sweet " " And so are you. " " "; " ; This cannot be confused with a string literal because a string literal cannot contain newline feeds.
  • flexagoon 1y ago
    What if you have something like const raw = "He said "Hello" "to me ; Wouldn't that be a mess to parse? How would you know that "He said " is not a string literal and that you have to continue parsing it as a multiline string? How would you distinguish an unclosed string literal from a multiline string?
• seabombs 1y ago
  I think the syntax highlighting for this could make it more readable. Make the leading `\\` a different color to the string content.
• zem 1y ago
  that was my favourite bit in the entire post - the one place where zig has unambiguously one-upped other languages. the problems it is solving are: 1. from the user's point of view, you can now have multiline string literals that are properly indented based on their surrounding source code, without the leading spaces being treated as part of the string 2. from an implementation point of view having them parsed as individual lines is very elegant, it makes newline characters in the code unambiguous and context independent. they always break up tokens in the code, regardless of whether they are in a string literal or not.