What's the problem with Scala's XML literals?

Posted by Oak on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Oak
Published on 2012-12-17T08:30:52Z Indexed on 2012/12/17 11:13 UTC
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In this post, Martin (the language's head honcho) writes:

[XML literals] Seemed a great idea at the time, now it sticks out like a sore thumb. I believe with the new string interpolation scheme we will be able to put all of XML processing in the libraries, which should be a big win.

Being interested in language design myself, I'm wondering: Why does he write that it was a mistake to incorporate XML literals into the language? What is the controversy regarding this feature?

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