[Developers] quoting in par-file strings

[Tom Goodale]

On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:

> Hi, Tom,
>
>> What is the advantage of having two different delimiters ?
>
> It allows the following cases to avoid needing any explicit quoting:
>  Thorn::blah = "this isn't so bad"
>  Thorn::quux = 'I like "double quotes", do you?'

That was the only advantage I could think of, and is one reason the tags 
tables are supposed to act like you described, but I am not convinced that 
this is enough to justify the extra coding and documentation;  places I've 
seen which allow both tend to have slightly different semantics for the 
two, e.g. in Perl double quoted strings can have substitutions in them and 
single quoted strings are verbatim.

It may be simpler for people to understand if we just say use double 
quotes, quote double quotes and backslashes, rather than allowing both 
single and double quotes.  As Erik said in his reply, it would be good to 
stick to a well established system, so I'd tend to go for a C-like one 
with double quotes.

Tom