Developing Storm

Monday, September 13, 2004
One of my favorite little features of scripting languages, like perl, ruby and groovy, is their support for here-documents. A here-document is a lot like a <pre> tag in html, but instead of declaring text for display you are declaring the contents of a string - line endings and all.

Instead of writing:

static String  test = 
    "This is line 1\r\n"+ 
    "This is line 2\r\n" + 
    "This is line 3\r\n" + 
    "This is line 4\r\n";

You get to write:

static String  test = <<<END_OF_BLOCK
This is line 1
This is line 2
This is line 3
This is line 4
END_OF_BLOCK

This is a great little feature for embedding little languages like HTML, XML or the alternate regular expression syntax I've been talking about within another language.

There's a JSE for the feature on Sun's Java developer site. Please vote for it if you agree it's a good idea.


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