[swift-evolution] Proposal for Replacing Keyword "subscript" with "subs"

[Seth Friedman]

I encourage you to read the Swift API Design Guidelines
<https://swift.org/documentation/api-design-guidelines.html>, as there are
a couple of things there that discourage what you are suggesting:

   - "*Clarity is more important than brevity*. Although Swift code can be
   compact, it is a *non-goal* to enable the smallest possible code with
   the fewest characters. Brevity in Swift code, where it occurs, is a
   side-effect of the strong type system and features that naturally reduce
   boilerplate."
   -

   *Avoid abbreviations*. Abbreviations, especially non-standard ones, are
   effectively terms-of-art, because understanding depends on correctly
   translating them into their non-abbreviated forms.

   The intended meaning for any abbreviation you use should be easily found
   by a web search.


Thanks,
Seth

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 6:52 PM Feijian Sun via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Thank you for responding so late!
>
> I agree with you that "subs" is not very obvious for subscript. While
> learning swift, I have a feeling that it contains so many long words as the
> keywords, such as
>
> fallthrough, dynamicType, associativity, convenience, nonmutating,
> precedence, etc..
>
> I understand there is a need for clarity. But I think it's also important
> to keep a concise and simple naming style where it's possible.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> ------------------------------
> Subject: Re: [swift-evolution] Proposal for Replacing Keyword "subscript"
> with "subs"
> From: jackl at apple.com
> Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 18:22:55 -0800
> CC: swift-evolution at swift.org
> To: feijian_sun at hotmail.com
>
>
> It’s non-obvious to me that “subs” is short for subscript, whereas “init”
> and “func” have only one obvious expansion.
>
> Jack
>
> On Dec 10, 2015, at 6:12 PM, Feijian Sun via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have a proposal to replace the long keyword "subscript" with the shorter
> version, "subs". The idea is to keep the concise naming style on the
> language keywords, like "init" and "func".
>
> So, Instead of:
>
> subscript(index: Int) -> Int {
>         ... ...
> }
>
> we could simply do:
>
> subs(index: Int) -> Int{
>         ... ...
> }
>
> Does this mean a big change on the parser side? what do you think?
>
> Thank you!
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