Semantics of new-line escaping in edgedb

Currently, all spaces are preserved, like in python:

edgedb>SELECT "hello \ 
.......       xxx";                    
{'hello       xxx'}

But I believe that’s legacy and I very much like rust’s semantics:

rust> println!("{:?}", "hello \
              world")
"hello world"

(i.e. stripping all whitespace at the start of the next line

This allows nicely indented long string phrases, and also allows breaking non-whitespace-separated texts:

WITH
    url := "http://example.com/\
            some/very/long/path"

(which is super-ugly with python semantics)

The downside is that you need to put whitespace before continuation:

second_line_indented := "def x():\n    \
                             return 'x'"

But with python’s semantics, inside and outside indentation typically do not match anyway.

What do you think?

[elprans]

Yeah, I withdraw my objection as well.

[vpetrovykh]

The zoom conversation clarified that actually the Rust semantics of \ are fine. All strings are white-space preserving in EdgeDB and the \ allows to opt out of that in specific cases. I got confused by the indentation example (which is easier to do by not using the unnecessary line continuation). So +1 on Rust semantics.