[Rd] [WISH / PATCH] possibility to split string literals across multiple lines

[Andreas Kersting]

-------- Original Message --------
From: Hadley Wickham [mailto:h.wickham at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, Jun 14, 2017 2:51 PM GMT
To: Simon Urbanek
Cc: Andreas Kersting; r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: [Rd] [WISH / PATCH] possibility to split string literals across 
multiple lines

> On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 8:48 AM, Simon Urbanek
> <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
>> As I recall this has been discussed at least a few times (unfortunately I'm traveling so can't check the references), but the justification was never satisfactory.
>>
>> Personally, I wouldn't mind string continuation supported since it makes for more readable code (I had one of my packages raise a NOTE in examples because there is no way in R to split a long hash into multiple lines), but I would be strongly against random removal of whitespaces as it's counter-intuitive, misleading and makes it impossible to continue spaces on the next line. None of the languages that I can think of with multiline strings do that as that's way too dangerous.
>
> Julia does, but uses triple quotes:
> https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/manual/strings/#triple-quoted-string-literals
>
> Hadley
>

If we consider bash a programming language: Here documents 
(http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/here-docs.html) can have leading tabs be 
removed (see Example 19-4).