On Oct 1, 2008, at 2:10 PM, Gregory Brown wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Eric Hodel <drbrain / segment7.net>  
> wrote:
>> On Oct 1, 2008, at 11:42 AM, James Gray wrote:
>>>
>>> On Oct 1, 2008, at 1:37 PM, Jim Freeze wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Under those circumstances, you really want some type of lexical  
>>>> (is that
>>>> the right word here) addition is not part of the language but  
>>>> part of the
>>>> preprocesser.
>>>
>>> Wild.  So the parser builds this as a single String literal?  I  
>>> didn't
>>> know that.
>>
>> Yes.  There are no method calls involved, it's handled directly in  
>> the
>> parser.
>
> At least there is some reason behind this feature.  But is it being
> used in practice anywhere?
>
> I've never seen it.

I went hunting for it and it is used at the very bottom of this Ruby  
Quiz solution:

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/141783

I know I've seen a heredoc with a regex used to normalize the space  
more often though and we still have the issue that this feature hides  
bugs.  I understand why it exists now, but I still have to question  
the value.

James Edward Gray II