Re: "Local variables" and continuation lines

[Richard Stallman]

    I think a very elegant approach is to concatenate all "value" strings
    for a variable. Variables can appear several times. All value strings
    are collected and concatenated.

I think that is confusing, and inconvenient in a practical sense.  It
would be much better to write

foo: bar\
quuxu

that write

foo: bar
foo: quux

for two reasons:

1. The former makes it clear what it means.  The latter could mean
various different things and you can't guess which.  It could just be
a mistake.  Maybe quux overrides bar, or vice versa.

2. With the latter, you might accidentally put something in between
and it will still "work"

foo: bar
other: t
foo: quux

but it is a recipe for confusion.


What do others think?