> On Jan 11, 2017, at 15:41, Joe Groff via swift-evolution > <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> On Jan 11, 2017, at 5:16 AM, Charlie Monroe via swift-evolution >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> -1. Why? Why not use foo2 instead? Is ' so much better? >> >> Instead, I'd personally love better character support in Swift in the future >> and allow a Character literals using ' - just like in C, except with Unicode >> support: >> >> let myChar = 'x' // Character >> let myChar2 = '∃' // Character >> let myChar3 = '\0' // NUL Character >> let myChar4 = 'xyz' // Error from compiler > > These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. If we require that an identifier > can't start with an apostrophe, then we can support identifiers named `x'` > and `'x'` as some kind of literal simultaneously. > > I'm sympathetic to this since I personally find x', x'', etc. more attractive > than x2, x3, etc. for totally superficial math weenie reasons, but although > the surface level language design is fairly straightforward, the downstream > tooling impact is nontrivial—we'd need a mangling for ' in symbol names, > simplified parsing tools would need to cope with ', tools that attempt to > parse out identifiers from error messages would have to deal with > apostrophe-unsafe output, etc. Not sure it's worth it.
Out of curiosity, instead of coming up with another mangling scheme, how hard would it be to add ' support to the downstream tooling? It's all open source, right? - Dave Sweeris _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
