Java has been inspired by many other languages... and continues to take good features and ideas from other languages...

It seems to be using a somewhat similar concept it calls "incidental white space", in order to limit the embedding of leading whitespace (unlike Python which just stores the entire triple-quoted string as-is), but is more permissive:

Text content can be indented less than the trailing delimiter, which I understand is an error in Swift

    String html = """
    ..............<html>
    ..............    <body>
    ..............        <p>Hello, world</p>
    ..............    </body>
    ..............</html>
    ..............    """;

The trailing delimiter can also be on the same line as the final content, which suppresses the final (new)line:

    """
    line 1
    line 2
    line 3"""

translates to

    "line 1\nline 2\nline 3"

whereas

    """
    line 1
    line 2
    line 3
    """

translates to

    "line 1\nline 2\nline 3\n"

I believe this requires escaping the newline in Swift instead (nb: according to the JEP this would also work in Java).

Slash at the end of the line serve the same purpose in Java

> Slash at the end of the line serve the same purpose in Java

As I wrote in my comment, yes.

More likely from Kotlin. The only difference is % instead of $. They also grabbed Kotlin's data classes (records in java).

Lots of cross pollination.

As the article says, they examined lots of languages, not just Kotlin (it would be arbitrary to confine their research to JVM languages..)

>> While Java could not adopt the Swift approach wholesale because of existing language constraints, the Java approach took as much inspiration from the good work that the Swift community did as we could -- and left room to take more in the future.

Seen this in Scala too.