There is also a non-contrived example in my original comment, String.split(&quot;\\s+&quot;). And the advice that regexes in python should always be constructed from r&quot;&quot; strings is a direct response to this problem specifically. I picked a contrived example to make clear that sharing escape characters causes exponential growth as you add layers.<p>&gt;&gt; Are you really arguing that we could make C less confusing by switching printf(&quot;%d&quot;, x) to printf(&quot;\\d&quot;, x)?<p>&gt; No. I did not say that at all, and I don&#x27;t appreciate straw man arguments.<p>This is an argument in a very standard form, reduction to absurdity.<p>I see printf escapes and C string backslash-based escapes as semantically identical; they are both ways of giving the parser instructions directly rather than giving it a literal representation of what you want (this analysis also nicely explains why they&#x27;re called &quot;escapes&quot;). But since there is a good amount of evidence that a lot of other programmers feel the same way you do, let me ask this: HTML escapes (with &amp;) have exactly the semantics you attribute to \. Do you think HTML would be better if it used backslashes instead?