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Comment by program | Hacker News Reader

Using the ` (backquote) character for multiline strings isn't a wise choice (probably inherited from Go) cause it's difficult to reach that character on non-english keyboard layout. In the italian layout it's alt+\ or alt+9 on the Mac but you can't reach it using Windows; you need to press alt+96.

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What other character would you suggest? At least multi line strings arent super common (nor essential) so extra difficulty isn't a major problem.

I don't think that there is the need for a new character. The problem here is that JS has automatic semicolon insertion. This:

  var a = "abc
   def";

generate a "unterminated string literal" syntax error cause a semicolon is inserted after abc. Why not using C/C++/ObjC syntax?

  var a = "a very "
   "very long string";

The only thing about the C syntax version is you still end up with a bunch of double quotes all over the place. The #1 reason I have for using multi-line strings currently is when writing full-out SQL or Javascript code inside C#; using C#'s @-prefixed strings make the whole thing a lot prettier to look at IMO.

For me personally I'll probably never have to write multi-line JS strings more than once a year so I don't really care about the feature, but I do agree with their way of implementing them.

> What other character would you suggest?

Fixing the language so newlines in strings are legal, Python-style triple quoting or some sort of string modifier prefix (similar to Python's rawstring modifier)

Friends don't let friends use layouts other than QWERTY (glares at the AZERTY keyboard her employer gave her that was rapidly replaced with a QWERTY from home).

I just press shift+´ to get `

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