[smugworth]

I love F-strings, my only gripe is the chosen syntax for invoking them. For starters, F may or may not be capitalized, so these two lines are identical.

  F"My string with {interpolated_value}"
  f'My string with {interpolated_value}'

Like using apostrophes or quotation marks to enclose strings (or F-strings), I find myself wasting time questioning the trivial notion of whether to capitalize or not.

I think Groovy's syntax is great, where quotation marks denote an interpolated string, and apostrophes denote a plain old string.

  "This is my ${interpolated_value} string"
  'This is my plain old string'

But these are nitpicks, and it's really too late to implement something like that.

[kragen]

> I think Groovy's syntax is great, where quotation marks denote an interpolated string, and apostrophes denote a plain old string.

That's Perl's syntax, from about 15 years before Groovy, whippersnapper. Off my lawn, now.

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, Groovy got it from Ruby which got it from Perl.

[kragen]

Yeah, Ruby uses the doublequote/singlequote distinction from Perl, but Ruby tags variables to interpolate with #{}, while Groovy and Perl use $.

Oh, although I guess Perl got that syntax from the Bourne shell…

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, Ruby uses the doublequote/singlequote distinction from Perl, but Ruby tags variables to interpolate with #{}, while Groovy and Perl use $.

Huh, I could have sworn that I remembered that Groovy has taken it from Ruby.

Incidentally, Ruby uses just # for variables, it uses #{} for arbitrary expressions. A common style prefers #{} even where # alone works, though.

[kragen]

#notallvariables

[vorg]

Apache Groovy's string syntax is deficient, not great. It doesn't have the docstrings syntax that Python, Ruby, and Perl all use.

An early beta version of Groovy 1.0 had it (thanks to a Sam Pullara), but it was later yanked out. Groovy's self-styled Project Manager at the time said he only wanted syntax in Groovy that would cause the Java syntax highlight rules in Eclipse and Netbeans to highlight Groovy code similar to Java, so if a manager was walking around the programming area, the screens would look like the programmers were using Java.

And that's how Groovy got its deficient string syntax.