Text is defined such that backslashes in the text must be escaped, e.g. \u12AB is required to be \\u12AB or \n is required to be \\n. I'm okay with requiring { and } literals to be escaped.

I am nervous that we're recreating the apostrophe disaster in MF1 by requiring every backslash to be escaped. Developers use e.g. \n or other escapes in strings all the time. Making double escapes out of them doesn't seem to be required except to allow for the literal \{ or \} to appear in a string.

I think we might be better off by making the placeholder markers self-escaping, e.g. if you want to have a literal { use {{. { and } are rare enough in real text that this might be much less of an impact than requiring every backslash to be doubled.

Originally posted by @aphillips in #344 (comment)