As Rob Mayoff pointed out, you can use MODIFIER LETTER PRIME - or PRIME, DOUBLE PRIME, and TRIPLE PRIME - which makes more sense than an apostrophe. Now if only there were a keyboard that had a touch-screen at the top which could be used for typing context-sensitive characters that would otherwise be difficult to type. So yeah, solution is to make characters easier to type, not modify the language. If like me you don't have such a keyboard, you can always use ctrl+⌘+<space> and type ‘PRIME’ to find it, then pick it from recently used/favourites.
Regarding the other point, I agree that character literals would be handy, but again I’m not sure if apostrophe is the right character to indicate it. Although it is familiar, perhaps LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK would be better, they can be relatively easily typed with ⎇+] and ⎇+⇧+] respectively. Xcode could also convert two apostrophes into ‘’ for you and your fingers would quickly learn to type ' ' ← ‹char›. On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 at 22:07 David Sweeris via swift-evolution < [email protected]> wrote: > 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
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