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I think the article he links to can basically be summarised as "Escaping considered harmful, here's a better way to solve the same problem". I don't see any evi
by billforsternz 11y ago
I think the article he links to can basically be summarised as "Escaping considered harmful, here's a better way to solve the same problem". I don't see any evidence that he doesn't understand escaping, and his claim that eliminating it would be a net win seems plausible (at least) to me.
- userbinator 11y agoI don't think what he proposes is really a better way, because requiring compilers to comprehend string concatenation and a few more extra reserved words specifically for the characters is a more complex and less general solution than encoding using the string itself, which is what escaping does. Escaping is amazingly elegant once you realise how general and simple it is, and it's also very important to understand it when designing things like data formats and protocols (length-delimited fields are the best, but it is not always possible.) Ignoring escaping, which is what would otherwise occur, tends to cause rather horrible security issues.
- billforsternz 11y agoI guess different people can look at the same thing and perceive an elegant solution OR an ugly mess. Note that the most important data protocols don't use escaping. I'm probably biased after years of DOS/Windows programming and having to remember to do things like "C:\\Users\\Bill\\documents" etc.