Re: Unicode string literals versus the world

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> 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.
>
> Well, quite aside from issues of compatibility with standards and other
> databases, I'm sure there are lots of Windows users who are more
> interested in being able to store a Windows pathname without doubling
> their backslashes than they are in being able to type readable names
> for ASCII control characters.  After all, in most cases you can get
> those characters into a string just by typing them (especially if you
> aren't using readline or something like it).

Well, that's fine, but that's a long way from Peter's statement that
"I think the tendency should be to get rid of E'' usage".  It's only
been a minor inconvenience for me to change my applications to use
E'', but I certainly don't see how I could get by without it, and it's
far more like other programming languages that I use (e.g. C) than the
standard syntax is.

...Robert