Question

Just curious what’s behind the decision of the Ruby developers to interpret the double-backslash escape sequence inside single quotes. I can understand why an escaped single-quote has to be interpreted because insertion of single-quote character won’t be possible. For example:

'\'' == "'"

But consider '\\' == "\\". Why is this another special case?

Answer 1

In order to end a String with a backslash

The one escape initially needed in hard-quoted strings is \', as others also note.

But the real, fundamental reason why \\ is also needed is because, once \' is supported, it otherwise would not be possible to end a hard-quoted string with a backslash.