[PD] Hide backslash escapes in symbol atoms

[Roman Haefeli]

On Thu, 2021-11-18 at 12:26 -0300, Alexandre Torres Porres wrote:
> I remember that discussion (I can try and find it) and I remember
> people agreed symbol box should hide "\".
> 
> I guess I can agree to that. In my idea, we know what's coming out of
> a symbol box, it's a symbol, so if you have a symbol with a space,
> then we know that the space is 'escaped' (that is, we're not
> splitting this into two atoms).

Yeah, it definitely should keep the symbol intact. But that to make
sure is an issue of the FUDI encoding. I don't type backslash escapes
and I also do not want them to be displayed. The backslashes are not
part of the payload, unless I type them explicitly. 

> But I think print should keep it, in the same way we also need to
> keep it for message boxes.
> 
> Outside the context of a symbol box, it is important to differentiate
> if we have, for instance, a list where one of the items contains an
> escaped space.
> 
> like, the message:
> 
> | list one\ item two < 
> 
> has two atoms "one item" and "two", and print should be able to tell
> us that.

Yeah, that's the FUDI encoding of a list containing two symbols. 


> Now, I don't know about the new list box. What if we want to create a
> list with an escaped space? It seems like a special and
> different case/context of a symbol box.

Yeah, obviously list boxes are for lists and symbol boxes for symbols.
I think for list boxes to be effective they need to show the FUDI
encoded value, which means displaying the escaping character. 

>  By the way, I've been testing it and it seems we can do this by
> putting the escaped character ourselves. That seems correct. But it
> would be different than the symbol box and maybe I guess it shouldn't
> be too problematic that the symbol box also shows escaped characters.

Yes, it is, imho, it is dead-ugly and confuses the distinction between
payload and encoding. I'm pretty happy that Python doesn't only print
"b'Z\xc3\xbcrich'" when I intend to print "Zürich". 

> They're not that common and we can document why this happens when it
> happens.

That would be confusing things even more.

Roman
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