[swift-evolution] Proposal: Replace logical AND (&&) and OR (||) operators with natural language "and" and "or"

[J. Cheyo Jimenez]

https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/2015-December/000032.html
https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/2015-December/000101.html


On Wednesday, December 16, 2015, Yannik Bloscheck via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I always found the logical AND (&&) and OR (||) operators a bit confusing.
> The & as symbol for AND is pretty common in the world, but the | for OR
> isn’t so much.
> They also need to be typed twice, because the simple & and | were already
> reserved for bitwise things in C. This makes it hard for beginners to
> understand why they have to use two characters every time, because bitwise
> operators are rarely used in the context of current end-user applications
> (I personally can’t remember any occasion where I have seen them in Apple's
> example projects).
> To be clear: I don’t think we should get rid or change the bitwise
> operators (if they even exist in Swift), I just want to illustrate why
> natural language "and" and "or" could be better for logical AND (&&) and OR
> (||) operators.
> So the classical && and || may not be the best choice to begin with, but
> if we look at them in the context in which the are used the most -
> if/else-statements - they seem even more odd.
> If/else-statements already use natural language: "if something {a} else
> {b}". Therefore "if something1 and something2 {a} else {b}" just would be
> the next logical step.
> This improves readability, because it literally can just be read. The
> brain doesn’t need to transfer && to "and" or || to "or". And because "and"
> and "or" are very short words there isn’t really much more typing needed
> than before.
>
> To illustrate my point compare the readability of this two lines yourself
> (for more realism copy them in a text editor of your choice and color the
> "if", "and", "&&" in the same color as they would be in an IDE):
> if something1 == true && something2 != false && something3 == true &&
> something4 != false && something5 == true && something6 != false {…}
> if something1 == true and something2 != false and something3 == true and
> something4 != false and something5 == true and something6 != false {...}
>
> The && and || have a long history in programming, but maybe it’s time to
> replace them with something better.
> Therefore I would suggest to replace && and || with natural language "and"
> and "or" in Swift 3 to make the code more readable.
> If the proposal gets accepted I would also suggest colouring them in the
> same color as the "if", "else" etc. in IDEs like Xcode for optimal
> readability.
>
>
> The impact on existing code would be the following:
>
> Current:
>
> if temperatureInCelsius >= 0 && raining == true {
>         print("You will need an umbrella")
> }
>
> if cash >= 0.01 || creditcard == true {
>         print("You can buy something here")
> }
>
> Proposal:
>
> if temperatureInCelsius >= 0 and raining == true {
>         print("You will need an umbrella")
> }
>
> if cash >= 0.01 or creditcard == true {
>         print("You can buy something here")
> }
>
>
> I’m sorry if this was already suggested somewhere or if there are obvious
> reasons against it which I didn’t think of.
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org <javascript:;>
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20151216/d738fcfb/attachment-0001.html>