[swift-dev] Roll-out of deprecating ++ and --

[Matthijs Hollemans]

The proposal for the removal of the ++ and -- operators states that,

> In terms of roll-out, we should deprecate them in the Spring Swift 2.x release (with a nice Fixit hint to cover common cases), and remove them completely in Swift 3.

Is it possible to keep the Spring 2.x release non-breaking and backwards compatible? Authors of books everywhere will be grateful. :-)

With the speed that Swift is moving, books are out-of-date before they even hit the shelves. Doing a major yearly update is manageable (barely) but more than that is a huge burden.

Most importantly, it is not a very nice experience for readers if the book they just bought is now wrong. The last thing you want to see as a beginner is warnings or error messages on code that you’ve just typed in from a book.

Now that the evolution of Swift is a community effort, it would be nice if the contribution of book and tutorial authors to the popularity of Swift is recognized and appreciated by the Swift team, and their concerns taken into account as well.

Thanks!

-Matthijs