On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, David W. Tamkin wrote:
I'm saying that defining and then using $NL is actually less error
prone than not.
That's what I question. In giving someone else a short snippet of code
that requires a literal newline in quotes exactly once, there's roughly
equal risk of the reader's messing this up....
Not that this is my argument to butt into, but I deal with 'mess ups' like
this quite frequently. And I know that a great many different mail clients
do 'bad' things to mail formatting, such that by the time I get something
in my inbox sometimes it may have any number of line breaks in weird
places. So if someone saw a line with a literal line break, I can easily
imagine them thinking it was just another 'accidental line wrap' and
removing it. "Fixing" what should not be fixed. An explicit "$NL" leaves
no doubt as to what is happening. Mind you a comment in the code would do
the same job ("next line has explicit quoted NL at end"). :)
But to be fair, for people other than watchful unix geeks (gryn) the
risks are *not* equal. Yes, someone could also fix the "line wrap" on the
definition of "NL" but at least someone would then wonder "what is that
"NL" thing supposed to be? As opposed to just removing the hard-coded
break and then losing the functionality unawares.... :)
- Charles
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