[recursivecaveat]

Wait until somebody uses string templating to insert something that ends with a backslash, changing the meaning of following characters from what the syntax highlighting thinks; a curse be upon that person.

Escaping/quoting is such a mud pile everywhere because it's in-band communication, but nobody would tolerate all out-of-band because it's too tedious. At least newer languages are getting better with things like 'raw' strings or Rust's arbitrarily long delimeters, but I'd still like more control.

I'm surprised I never see languages adopt directed delimeters like {my string} or something, since it lets you avoid escaping in the very common case of balanced internal delimeters.