Should literal BLANK! be one, or two underscores?

[hostilefork]

@hostilefork

@rgchris suggested something that had already run across my mind a few times. Are BLANK! literals a bit too thin at just one character wide?

Underscore is a very slight character in the first place. Two characters would make it stand out, and be the same width as empty block or a void-evaluating group:

data: __
rule: []
void: ()

Compare with:

data: _
rule: []
void: ()

So this comes up again with quasiforms, because ~~ is now available again

I definitely think _ and ~ should be BLANK! and quasiform blank. But I do wonder if there's any value to allowing you to make arbitrary length versions, and get their length?

>> foo: ____
== ____

>> type of foo
== &[blank]

>> length of foo
== 4

>> bar: '~~
== ~~

>> type of bar
== &[quasiform]

>> length of bar
** Error: can't use length on quasiform

>> unquasi bar
== __

>> length of unquasi bar
== 2

What use would such a thing have? I don't know. But the interesting thing is that this formulation is coherent, it doesn't lexically get confused with anything else and it holds up cohesively.

Long sequences of BLANK! have a problem in dialect use that you can't tell how long they are. But I can imagine uses for ~~ and ~~~ in dialects, and as I show above you can't really ask quasiforms their length, so the unquasi'd form as blanks would basically just exist to let you get at that count.

It's something to think about.