String Literal - Declarative Notation

Declarative Notation

In the original FORTRAN programming language (for example), string literals were written in so-called Hollerith notation, where a decimal count of the number of characters was followed by the letter H, and then the characters of the string:

This declarative notation style is contrasted with bracketed delimiter quoting, because it does not require the use of balanced "bracketed" characters on either side of the string.

Advantages:

• eliminates text searching (for the delimiter character) and therefore requires significantly less overhead
• avoids the problem of delimiter collision
• enables the inclusion of metacharacters that might otherwise be mistaken as commands
• can be used for quite effective data compression of plain text strings

Drawbacks:

• this type of notation is error-prone if used as manual entry by programmers

This is however not a drawback when the prefix is generated by an algorithm as most likely the case