Why do strings in almost all languages require that you escape the quotations?
for instance if you have a string such as
"hello world""
why do languages want you to write it as
"hello world\""
Do you not only require that the string starts and ends with a quotation?
You can treat the end quote as the terminating quote for the string. If there is no end quote then there is an error. You can also assume that a string starts and ends on a single line and does not span multiple lines.
Suppose I want to put ", " into a string literal (so the literal contains quotes).
If I did that without escaping, I’d write "", "". This looks like two empty string literals separated by a comma. If I want to, for example, call a function with this string literal, I would write f("", ""). This looks to the compiler like I am passing two arguments, both empty strings. How can it know the difference?
The answer is, it can’t. Perhaps in simple cases like "hello world"", it might be able to figure it out, for at least some languages. But the set of strings which were unambiguous and didn’t need escaping would be different for different languages and it would be hard to keep track of which was which, and for any language there would be some ambiguous case which would need escaping anyway. It is much easier for the compiler writer to skip all those edge cases and just always require you to escape quotation marks, and it is probably also easier for the programmer.