[bitc-dev] Newline conventions

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

Before somebody feels compelled to point out how horrible it is, let me
say that I am already coming to *hate*

	#\{linefeed}

More importantly, I am coming to hate strings like

	"Hello, world\{linefeed}"

The entire current convention for character syntax is a nightmare. After
reviewing the conventions used by Scheme, here is the revised plan that
will be coming up in the next revision of the language specification:

Characters:

  #\X is the character X provided X is printable 
  #\U+XXXX is a unicode code point
  #\tab
  #\newline
  #\space

Strings, between the outer double quotes:

  X is a character if X is printable
  \n -- newline
  \r -- carriage return
  \t -- horizontal tab
  \\ -- backslash
  \f -- formfeed
  \b -- backspace (?)
  \" -- double quote embedded in the string
  \U+XXXX -- unicode code point.

This should improve things quite a lot.


shap