I inherited some Java code from a guy that thought you could only return strings from a method.

So how did he ever pass anything other than a string, I hear you ask? He had a (hand crafted, using no libraries, and not escaping anything properly) toXml() and fromXml() method on each object.

Yeah...

For some reason the backend kept throwing errors when I tried to save a long string containing markdown. Initially I assumed I must be escaping things incorrectly but that all looked fine. Asked the backend guy to take a look.

Turned out that in order to count the number of words they were using a regex, which seems fine, unless you construct the regex out of my string and run that over the word count regex... 🤔

It is a PITA, when you have to triple escape single and double quotes in strings in order to get your stuff working.

I'm developing a new (just for fun) programming language and I'm wondering what features I should add next? These features are already implemented:

- Printing text
- Variables
- user-input
- Datatype conversion (String, Int, Float, Bool, List, Dictionary)
- lists/arrays
- dictionaries
- Sorting
- Shuffling
- random numbers & choices
- Math stuff like: log, abs, floor, ceiling, sin, etc...
- Time & Date
- Working with files
- If-else statements
- Ternary operators
- Loops (for & while)
- Functions
- Classes
- Error handling
- Importing libraries & other scripts
- Arrow/callback functions
- Escaping (\)

is there anything you often use missing?

Another hours wasted on debugging, on what I hate most about programming: strings!

Don't get me started on C-strings, this abomination from hell. Inefficient, error prone. Memory corruption through off by one errors, BSOD by out of bound access, seen it all. No, it's strings in general. Just untyped junk of data, undocumented formats. Everything has to be parsed back and forth. And this is not limited to our stupid stupid code base, as I read about the security issues of using innerHTML or having to fight CMake again.

So back to the issue this rant is about. CMake like other scripting languages as bash have their peculiarities when dealing with the enemy (i.e. strings), e.g. all the escaping. The thing I fought against was getting CMake's fixup_bundle work on macOS. It was a bit pesky to debug. But in the end it turned out that my file path had one "//" instead of an "/" and the path comparison just did a string comparison without path normalization.

Stop giving us enough string to hang ourselves!