Revert reservation of ":" within styled regions #30
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In 5dd8b9e we reserved the use of ":" in styled regions in anticipation of the potential use of a style and format construction "{style:content:format}" inspired by Python's f-strings. It has since become apparent that this causes more headaches than anticipated in Julia. The primary reason for this is the different syntactic meaning that ":" has in Julia compared to Python. While in Python ":" serves as a block terminator (used after: if, for, while, def, etc.), in Julia ":" can appear /within/ expressions (namely with ranges and indexing), for example: 1:2:9 m[1, :] :(1 + 2) This means that when formatting an expression, copy-paste is now subtly error-prone as not just quotes but colons will need to be escaped. This adds to the minor, but present, annoyance of having to escape ":" in "{style:content}" constructions, and in my mind tips the scales towards the prospective "{style:content:fmt}" syntax no longer being worth it. A more promising alternative is to go with something like "${fmt:expr}". By both this and "{style:content}" having a single delimiting colon, we can simply read everything until the paired closing curly parentheses at the end of the form as expr/content. The use of "$" in "${fmt:expr}" is also evocative of Julia's $-interpolation syntax, which is appropriate given that expr would be evaluated. While a formating syntax, let alone system, is not decided on at this stage, I think we can safely un-reserve the colon.
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Given a week's gone by with no comment, I'll go ahead with this now 🙂 |
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Closes #28 (which see).
Will merge shortly if everything appears to be in order.