It never is, and if it was every language would be a hodgepodge of things some people liked at one time.

Yeah we call that PHP (and I say that as someone who uses PHP all day and quite likes it).

I was actually thinking of PHP as I wrote that comment, I didn't want to call it out directly

Oh, that's where it comes from. As a non-PHP user, I thought it was a strange feature.

No, it's much much older than PHP. It's in PHP because it was in Perl (which is also why it's in Ruby). I think iit was in Perl because it was in sh. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's older than that. Snobol maybe?

I'm not asking for them to make it default for everyone. I just want it for me. So at a file level or something.

Maybe, but it is a disappointing reason. I imagine OP was hoping for some insightful, more objective reason for this.

Sure, but "I like it" is actually a good reason. You can dissect I like it into maybe that I find it more productive, that I find strings easier to read when they're like that, or for other reasons, but it actually boils down to aesthetics: I like it :)