> On Jan 11, 2017, at 23:12, Tony Allevato <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 6:46 PM Jay Abbott via swift-evolution
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 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›.
>>
> I'm not entirely convinced that we *need* special Character literals. The
> type checker is already able to treat a double-quoted string literal as a
> String, Character, or UnicodeScalar based on context in most places. Wouldn't
> it be more valuable to fill the gaps, like Charlie Monroe mentioned above,
> where these work:
>
> let c: Character = "a"
> let c = "a" as Character
>
> and this is caught as an error by the compiler:
>
> let c: Character = "ax"
>
> but this slips through and crashes at runtime?
>
> let c = Character("ax")
>
> I wonder what improvements could be made in the compiler to have that last
> one do something more appropriate than just call Character.init(String),
> which causes the runtime error.
This reminds me of the "URL literal" thread. I believe the two ideas were
essentially to add regex support to the compiler, add support for compiler
"validation" of literals through compile-time functions, or both.
IIRC, it was decided that both ideas were at least out of scope for phase 1 (I
don't recall if this specific issue was brought up as a potential use case,
though... unlike `Character`, `URL` isn't part of the stdlib).
- Dave Sweeris
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