[swift-evolution] Brace syntax

[Kevin Ballard]

There is not in fact an emphasis on conciseness. This has been repeated many times by the swift team. Conciseness is not a goal of Swift, but expressiveness absolutely is. Braces are a well-understood and simple way to express the notion of a scope/closure. And FWIW removing braces means you have to come up with a completely different syntax for closures, because indentation does not suffice there.

Also, "don't be like C" is not even remotely a goal of Swift. The Swift syntax is C-like in many respects. "Be like C" isn't a goal either of course, but when deciding between two alternatives that have no compelling arguments either way, picking the one that would be more familiar to Obj-C programmers is usually a good idea.

-Kevin Ballard

On Sat, Dec 19, 2015, at 05:39 PM, Alexander Regueiro via swift-evolution wrote:
> Has anyone considered removing braces from the Swift language? The main alternative would be indentation-based scoping like in Python or Ruby. There already seems to be a general emphasis on conciseness,  lack of redundancy, and a modern syntax. e.g. semicolons are not required for single-line statements; brackets have been removed from if/for/while expressions, compared to C-style syntax. So, why not go the whole way in breaking the C-style connection? The present syntax seems to be shunning C, but only slightly.
> 
> Thoughts?
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