I think higherThan and lowerThan are not excessively wordy, they are the 
correct mathematical term, and the IDE can help you autocomplete that else it 
is a quick snippet job.

Sent from my iPhone

> On 2 Jul 2016, at 22:52, Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On painting the relative-precedence bikeshed, I would lean slightly toward 
> “before” and “after”. They are short, single words with unambiguous meaning.
> 
> Moreover, the actual point of interest is “Which operators will be evaluated 
> before which other ones?”
> 
> Plus the word “precedence” itself connotes the idea of one thing preceding 
> another, which is exactly what “before” and “after” convey.
> 
> It is true that we often talk about things having “higher” precedence, but in 
> context that becomes “higherThan”, which is lengthy.
> 
> Now “above” / “below” would work just fine, though to me at least it isn’t as 
> immediately-self-evident which is which for operators, as it would be with 
> “before” / “after”.
> 
> Another option would be “aheadOf” / “behind”, which seem clear in meaning but 
> mismatched in word-count.
> 
> Actually, I think “precedes” / “follows” might be worth considering. The 
> former would be more common and it exactly matches not only the semantic but 
> the exact terminology we want. Maybe “follows” isn’t maximally ideal, but at 
> least it doesn’t have a synonym problem like “succeeds” does.
> 
> Even there though, an ambiguity exists between “the group being defined 
> precedes the listed one” and “the listed group precedes the one being 
> defined”.
> 
> So I would still tend toward prepositional descriptors, especially “before” 
> and “after”.
> 
> Nevin
> 
>> On Friday, July 1, 2016, Anton Zhilin via swift-evolution 
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> John McCall via swift-evolution <swift-evolution@...> writes:
>> 
>> > > There is a high chance that 'higherThan'/'lowerThan' names will be
>> > > chosen. I still see a problem with that. Keywords in Swift are
>> written
>> > > in full lowercase, so we should actually take
>> 'higherthan'/'lowerthan'.
>> > >
>> > > But then what's the point of the preposition? It blends with
>> > > higher/lower and doesn't actually add any clarity. So we should drop
>> > > 'than' and have just higher/lower or above/below or
>> succeeds/preceeds or
>> > > whatever we choose, but *in a single word*.
>> >
>> > The preposition does add clarity.  Are the listed precedences the ones
>> that are
>> > higher than the current precedence, or are they the ones that the
>> current
>> > precedence is higher than?
>> >
>> > John.
>> 
>> I meant that following keywords should be preferred to be written in all
>> lowercase. But in our case, we lose clarity from doing so.
>> 
>> An elegant solution seems to be to find expressive single-word keywords
>> for our purpose, their advantage is that they can strictly follow
>> keyword naming rules without losing clarity.
>> 
>> It seems that mine and some other people' concerns are based on this
>> naming inconsistency of  higherThan  and  lowerThan. There are plenty of
>> other good options: above/below, before/after, precedes/succeeds.
>> 
>> I know your opinion, but anyways want this argument to be risen during
>> internal discussion.
>> 
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