Cruising Along with Java: Text Blocks

Hi Venkat!

I read the excerpt from your book on Java text blocks (URL below). I haven't seen this syntax in the wild yet, but it totally reminded me of Python. Do you think this Java feature came from Python's triple-quoted strings?

https://media.pragprog.com/titles/vscajava/blocks.pdf

Don't know myself. They spent a long time developing text blocks. They started with some sorl of multi‑line String about Java12, only as a preview feature. They added some methods to String and pre‑deprecated them. Just as well; they became unnecessary when text blocks came along a few versions later.

Highly probable. The C preprocessor allows something functionally similar, but the syntax is very different.

Another place where you can find multi-line text blocks is in YAML, but again, the syntax isn´t that much like Java's.

Groovy also uses triple quotes for text blocks. There are some differences though: Groovy interpolates when using triple double quotes (not when using single quotes), and doesn't trim leading whitespace.

Yeah, but Python had triple-quoted strings much earlier.  I heard it was present in the beginning, in 1991.  The earliest I found documentation for was Python 1.4 from 1996.  Groovy came out in 2003 or so.  Of course, some other language may have had the feature before Python...

The quick reference for Python 1.1 (Oct 1994) includes it:

python quick-ref.1.1 wrote:
Strings
"a string"
'another string'
'''a string containing embedded newlines,
and quote (') marks, can be
delimited with triple quotes.'''

https://www.python.org/ftp/python/doc/1.1/quick-ref.1.1.html

Thanks, good catch.  By the time this feature was being considered for Java, it was present in many other languages.    JEP 326 notes that triple double quotes were being used by Groovy, Kotlin, Python, Scala and Swift.  So it was definitely catching on in many places.

Readong that JSP326 has brought back “raw Strings” to me. They were delimited with backticks/backquotes.

Hi Rick,

Modern languages like Kotlin and almost any language like Java that keep evolving are inspired by not one but many languages. I often hear from developers who compare language X syntax or feature to a language Y's syntax or feature, often because they're familiar with language Y. However, when we begin to learn multiple languages we realize that some features or syntax exist in more than one language and the authors of a particular language are not specifically focusing on what's in one particular language.

The developers who are evolving the Java language are continuously visiting many languages, not all mainstream, and then asking how can some features be implemented in Java to make it most effective for Java programmers. At that point, the influence of any one language is not as significant as what lessons have been learned overall in the industry and how can Java bring the features to be most effective to Java programmers.

Regards,

Venkat

VS: Thank you for answering all those questions