The \c escape

[Scott Daniels]

In article <1719 at ogcvax.ogc.edu> plumbc at admin.ogc.edu (Colin Plumb) writes:
>I'd like to endorse this proposal.  It has practical value, it breaks
>nothing, and is not terribly hard to implement...
>I would prefer '\ ' to '\c', since a non-alphanumeric character better
>indicates the magicness of the escape, and ' ' is as close to the
>"nothing" meaning of the escape as printable ASCII can get.
This is a dangerous substitute, since it is impossible to look at a source
file and see whether the whitespace there is a tab or a space.  If you
must avoid a letter (I really don't see why, every \* thing is "magic"),
why not use '\_', which has the emptiness property, but is at least visually
distinguishable.  Also, some printing systems provide so little area for
a space, it is not immediately clear whether '\n' and "\ n" are different.

-Scott Daniels		daniels at teklds.TEK.COM or daniels at teklds.UUCP