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

[Chris Lattner]

> 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?

Hi Feijian,

I agree with Jack in this case that we should keep "subscript".  Swift's rough approach to keywords is: 

1) reuse contracted keywords that are widely known in the C family when the connotations are obvious (e.g. struct, enum, etc).  
2) contract some “new” keywords for the *most commonly occurring* situations (e.g. func/var, though var is precedented in a number of extended c family languages like javascript), because people are expected to be forced to learn these things in the first few days of their swift learning.
3) otherwise, use a full word (subscript, convenience, mutating, etc).

In the case of subscript, it doesn’t occur often enough to be worth forcing people to memorize, and thus we prefer obvious clarity in the situations when it occurs in code.

-Chris

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