Re: Unicode string literals versus the world

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> This doesn't excite me.  I think the tendency should be to get rid of E''
> usage, because its definition of escape sequences is single-byte and ASCII
> centric and thus overall a legacy construct.  Certainly, we will want to keep
> around E'' for a long time or forever, but it is a legitimate goal for
> application writers to not use it, which is after all the reason behind this
> whole standards-conforming strings project.  I wouldn't want to have a
> forward-looking feature such as the Unicode escapes be burdened with that kind
> of legacy behavior.
>
> Also note that Unicode escapes are also available for identifiers, for which
> there is no existing E"" that you can add it to.

Maybe I've just got my head deeply in the sand, but I don't understand
what the alternative to E'' supposedly is. How am I supposed to write
the equivalent of E'\t\n\f' without using E''? The
standard_conforming_strings syntax apparently supports no escapes of
any kind, which seems so hideously inconvenient that I can't even
imagine why someone wants that behavior.

...Robert