A few thoughts:
1) I would like to see Xcode gain a couple more literal types using the same
strategy it does for Image and Color literals
2) I would LOVE to see simple equation typesetting in Xcode
(Those two are mostly up to the Xcode team as opposed to swift, I suppose)
3) Why are we pretending like we can always edit swift in a ASCII editor? The
argument that actually using unicode would break things doesn’t seem valid,
because Swift has supported unicode since version 1, and people have been using
it since that time to name both variables and operators. That doesn’t mean we
need a super fancy editor, but I think requiring unicode awareness is
completely reasonable. If your editor from the 1970’s breaks something, it is
both your and your editor’s fault, not the code or the library, because Swift
has unicode in it’s spec.
4) I don’t think we should let the difficulty of typing certain things stop us.
It is an issue we need to consider, but it is an issue which can be solved
fairly easily with good UI design if there is a need. Sure, different editors
might solve it in different ways, but they will all solve it if it is useful
(and in a few years, we will have all settled on the best approach). As people
have mentioned, it can be difficult to type ‘{‘ on certain language layouts, so
if we limited ourselves by that we couldn’t do anything. We shouldn’t adopt a
lowest common denominator approach.
5) The lack of ‘≤’ has driven me absolutely nuts since Swift 1. It won’t be
confusing if we let people do either ‘<=‘ or ‘≤’ (there is research by Apple in
the late 80’s that proves this). We all learned the symbol in math class. Even
non-programmers know what it means. Assigning it any other meaning would be
confusing because it’s meaning is so widely known. Every time I bring this up,
I am told to just roll my own (which I have)… but it means that my code will
now clash with everyone else’s identical implementation (because there is only
one sane way to implement it). The fact that there are multiple identical
implementations interfering with each other (and no real way to make a
significantly different implementation) tells me it really should be part of
swift itself. Every time I bring it up, people complain about it being extended
ASCII instead of pure ASCII, and that it is hard to type on a German keyboard
(those people can either just type ‘<=‘ or use a better editor which
autocompletes ‘<=‘ to ‘≤’).
6) My recommendations for typing symbols would be:
a) Choose a subset of useful and well-known symbols instead of every
symbol
b) Allow autocomplete on those symbols by name
c) Optionally choose a little-used guardian character to start the
names of symbols (to avoid accidental autocompletion).
Thanks,
Jon
> On Aug 28, 2017, at 7:57 PM, John Pratt via swift-evolution
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I sent a postal envelope to the Swift team with an article I wrote, arguing
> that
> symbols and graphics would push the programming language forward.
>
> Wouldn’t it be nice to have an actual multiplication matrix broken out into
> code,
> instead of typing, “matrix()”? It seems to me Swift has the chance to do
> that.
>
> Also: why does "<==" still reside in code as "less than or equal to” when
> there is a unicode equivalent that looks neat?
>
> Why can’t the square of x have a superscript of 2 instead of having
> “pow(x,2)?
> I think this would make programming much easier to deal with.
>
> I expound on this issue in my article:
>
> http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf
> <http://www.noctivagous.com/nct_graphics_symbols_prglngs_draft2-3-12.pdf>
>
> Thank you for reading.
>
>
> -John
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