At first blush I'm not a fan, I'm not sure that the use of ~c"foo" will be any less confusing than 'foo' - it will still look like a string, and behave like a list, but now with a sigil by it which new Elixir programmers will not remember and will need to look up. I also suspect this means there will be a great deal of code which needs to be updated to handle this deprecation as well. Another question I have is what happens to single quotes? Will they be used for some other purpose once removed? Reserved?
To be honest, I didn't even know about ~c"foo", I've never used it, and haven't seen it in the wild. If you hadn't just now explained what it was, I would've had to go look it up. One of the very first things in the Elixir docs is the discussion of data types, especially string-like ones - if one doesn't read those docs, the confusion is going to occur regardless of what syntax is used to express charlists. To me it seems like a huge change with little to no real benefit. Of course, that's just my perspective/opinion, maybe the community at large disagrees with that sentiment. Paul On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 12:03 PM, José Valim < jose.va...@plataformatec.com.br> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > I have mentioned a couple times we would start a discussion for > deprecating 'single quotes as char lists' from the language. > > The use of single quotes to specify something that looks like a string but > isn't really a string is often a source confusion. This is specially > frustrating given the expectation brought from other languages where double > and single quoted strings can be used almost interchangeably. > > We already have a quite decent way of writing char lists, which is by > using sigils: ~c"foo". For new developers, printing a char list as a > ~c"foo" will likely give them better clues the type is not the same as > "foo". > > Of course we should not drive decisions based purely on the getting > started experience but I believe the sigil approach will be clearer for > beginner and advanced programmers alike. > > The plan is not to deprecate them now but rather in the long term. > Something like this: > > 1. Elixir v1.4 will inspect 'abc' as ~c"abc" > 2. Elixir v1.6 will effectively deprecate 'abc' > 3. Elixir v2.0 "who knows when" will remove single-quotes > > Thoughts? > > *José Valim* > www.plataformatec.com.br > Skype: jv.ptec > Founder and Director of R&D > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "elixir-lang-core" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to elixir-lang-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/elixir-lang-core/CAGnRm4%2BX9q9SAZjj4otmbjXRBhJyvQk0r% > 3D8pERwtrFcAczGNPQ%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/CAGnRm4%2BX9q9SAZjj4otmbjXRBhJyvQk0r%3D8pERwtrFcAczGNPQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elixir-lang-core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elixir-lang-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-core/CAK%3D%2B-TtsGGR3DDPKOin1Vvaees4W_vrrVd5H9BfL_VbDqbGBMA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
