backslashes in quoted symbol names

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Jan,

> when you introduced general support for quoted symbol names, did
> you consider \ (used to escape double quotes) to itself possibly be
> part of a (quoted) symbol name?

To be honest, no I did not consider this. :-(

> As pointed out in
> 
> https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/2021-June/116852.html
> 
> in a somewhat hidden way, not requiring backslashes to themselves
> also need escaping means that despite the quoting it's impossible
> to have a symbol name end in a backslash. Granted that's a pretty
> unusual way of naming a symbol, but anything requiring quoting
> probably is.
> 
> Question is whether it is reasonable to change this now, almost 6
> years later, and potentially break people already using backslashes
> in symbol names.

Hmmm.  I am tempted to say that we should fix this, on the grounds
that symbol names that include backslashes must surely be very rare.
I suppose that if we are being really paranoid we should include a
method for restoring the old behaviour if need be.  (Ie yet another
command line options).

Is this only a problem for backslashes at the end of symbol names ?
Presumably the backslash-at-end is currently ignored ?  One thing
we could do in this case is issue a warning message saying that the
backslash will be ignored.  Then any user that is affected could fix
their code to escape the backslash.

Cheers
   Nick