Multiline string literals in EOL

[kolovos]

String literals in EOL can be multi-line as shown below.

This "feature" is unintentional and undocumented. Before da11738 we used SingleLineRules to syntax-highlight string literals in Epsilon Eclipse's editors, which was masking this. However, in da11738 the EOL editor became consistent with the parser and now uses MultiLineRules. This can create some awkward syntax highlighting when a string is not properly closed with a single/double quote as shown below.

What's more, being an accidental feature, multi-line strings are not properly supported (e.g. indentation is not considered when computing their contents). To maintain backwards compatibility, one option would be to use SingleLineRules for double-quoted strings and raise a warning in the editor when multi-line double-quoted strings are used. For single-quoted strings, we can keep the MultiLineRule for syntax highlighting and not raise a warning, with the intention of improving support for them in 3.0 (i.e. in 3.0 onwards double-quoted strings would be single-line and single-quoted strings would be multi-line with proper support for indentation).

[kolovos]

After discussion on Slack, the consensus is that we should make single/double-quoted strings single-line in 3.x and add triple-quoted text blocks for multi-line strings in line with Java. In the meantime, we will switch to SingleLineRules for single/double-quoted string literals and raise a warning in the editor when they include new line characters.

[Arkaedan]

Is there any chance we could get string interpolation in single and multiline strings? Maybe with EGL syntax?

[kolovos]

I like the idea and reusing EGL makes a lot of sense.