Comment by afiori

9 hours ago

The best multiline strings are those where you can have proper indentations without having to guess how indentation is handled. bonus points for making nesting easy and making copy-pasting work without breaking indentation.

To my knowledge only Zig's multiline strings work this way

    const hello_world_in_c =
        \\#include <stdio.h>
        \\
        \\int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        \\    printf("hello world\n");
        \\    return 0;
        \\}
    ;

6 comments

afiori

moogly 2 hours ago

Probably the 2nd most baffling thing in Zig for me.

C#:

  var helloWorldInC =
      """
      #include <stdio.h>
  
      int main(int argc, char **argv) {
          printf("hello world\n");
          return 0;
      }
      """;

pavel_lishin 2 hours ago

I clicked on that FAQ link, because I wasn't familiar with zig-style multilines, and my initial reaction was "ew, ugly" - but reading the justifications, I think it rather won me over with how it addresses the indentation issue alone.

1718627440 7 hours ago

In C:

    char string[] = 
        "multi\n"
        "line\n"
        "string";

Granted, this is not a real multiline string, but you also have characters in your Zig example that are not part of string content (\\).

librasteve 8 hours ago

okaay, I get that you want the indentation to work (ironically this is more important when you are multilining a Python code example), but having to manage all the \\ is a pain in the butt

oneeyedpigeon 8 hours ago
> ironically this is more important when you are multilining a Python code example
And neither seems to be a great use case for configuration. A markup language, sure, but I'm not sure I see a significant need for multiline strings (even in general) in a config file.
- librasteve 7 hours ago
  
  fair point … although I can see a use case for eg multline multi languages contractual boilerplate that i don’t want in my main code