That you know how to use the language without such oddities presenting any difficulty does not make them less strange. That r-string parsing solution is fine fo

That you know how to use the language without such oddities presenting any difficulty does not make them less strange. That r-string parsing solution is fine for the interpreter, but we are not interpreters, so it's not a logical outcome for Python authors, The most puzzling thing is few languages use the absolute simplest solution to escaping quotes, which happens to be especially useful for non-expanded literals, and that's good ol' quote-doubling. Difficult for Python to introduce now since it'd be a bc-break for implied concatenation, but if space were required between them, we could have had x = r'ex\x20cape!\' y = 'diff''rent' z = 'diff' 'erent' respectively containing ex\x20cape!\ diff'rent different TOML has a similar issue: it is impossible to store its delimiter for non-expanded multi-line strings inside a multi-line non-expanded string. There's no method to escape it. Whilst this is rarely an issue in practice, it's odd that there's unnecessary difficulty in writing about TOML inside a TOML document. Again, it could have used the simpler quote-doubling method for all strings (even easier because no concatenation), with similar rules for non-expanded and multi-line variants. Then there would be no limitation on what can be stored in any literal type. Instead it has a peculiarity that's illogical and offers no benefit to us authors.