(as contributor):
I heartily agree with your reasoning about using normal quotation marks. After all this time, |horse| just looks weird to me.

However, I note that our syntax will be embedded into file formats (I cited JSON in the #263 thread) or into code. These syntaxes already use ' or " for quotes, so ours will have to be escaped in those contexts. Indeed, I believe the reason you want to add both quotes is because JS allows such quote alternation--but other syntaxes are more rigorous about one or the other and do not. Messages being ported between runtime environments with different quoting rules will be prone to failures due to over- and underzealous escaping.

(as chair):
This issue was previously resolved in February after long debate. This cannot be merged until we discuss it as a group. You need to write up the pros/cons for consideration.

I think I understand @eemeli’s position, but my current view is to oppose this change.

The premise of the presented argument seems to be that the current delimiter syntax is unusual. That’s true, but more crucially, I’d say our unquoted literal syntax is even more unusual. So we’re already in the realm of “weirdness”, and extending it a bit by choosing | as the delimiter seems reasonable to me given the “why”.

We expect quotes literals to be rare. We tend to give two corollaries from the rareness argument, which contradict each other:

1. Because it’s rare (we’ve taken care to optimize for the common case), it’s OK if the syntax for the rare case is a bit exotic.

2. Because it’s rare, people will use it less often, and won’t always remember the correct syntax if the syntax is too exotic.

I think that just looking at these two points of view won’t lead us to a consensus. That’s where trade-offs and use-cases come into play.

Using regular quotes as delimiters comes with a cost: embedding into most other programming languages and container formats will require caution. Using exotic delimiters prevents this one class of issues.

Exotic syntax is OK if it’s well justified. I think users will understand and learn to use it.

I 100% agree with the "weirdness" part.

But I think the original reasons for | was that:

• we need some kind of quoting, because of possible spaces in the values quoted
• we didn't like " or ' because the conflict with a lot of existing file formats

And since none of that changed, I would not change this.

TLDR: same concerns as Addison & Stas

+0. Voicing pure neutrality on this one. This is 🎨 . The OCaml'er and pgpsql'er in me is fine with the pipes. The more common lang developer in me (TS, rust) is fine with the quotes. We're in a DSL. I like to think that consumers of DSLs have a natural intuition of "DSL rules apply here, not my own presumptions", ...but given the correlation/pairing that MF2 has with programming concepts, it's a nice byproduct to have literal grouping aligned between paradigms. " is the unambiguous, ubiquitous char for bounding text content in written language, so I'd lean that way, but not powerfully enough to voice a strong stake.

Converting this to draft until #477 is eventually accepted, at which point this can be rebased or abandoned.

Closed per telecon of 2023-11-27