Distinguishing Strings By Delimiters Used

Development Datatypes
1

If it were possible to transcode {whatever} and "whatever" such that they could be identified as different symbols (not asking for different properties, just the ability to distinguish between them as different symbols), that would open up another lane of lexical space for some dialects.

In other words, if you could transcode {whatever} and be able to identify it as a (making up this name) LONG-TEXT!, which is a form in the family of TEXT! with the same property as a SERIES.

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2

I'm not sure what specific ideas you had in mind with this...

...but maybe the FENCE! proposal covers it?

Historically strings have presented a challenge to retaining the quoting style you used to make them, because:

  • Some strings are created programmatically and don't come from a LOAD, so they have no initial delimiters.

  • Mutations can make it so you can't use the same delimiter to output the string as when you LOADed it...

    >> str: "abc"
== "abc"

>> append str {"}
== {"abc}