[swift-evolution] ed/ing, InPlace, Set/SetAlgebra naming resolution

[Xiaodi Wu]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 7:31 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution
<swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> on Thu Feb 11 2016, Jarod Long <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>>> On Feb 11, 2016, at 15:20, Erica Sadun <erica at ericasadun.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 11, 2016, at 4:17 PM, Dave Abrahams
>>>> <dabrahams at apple.com
>>>> <mailto:dabrahams at apple.com>> wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> For the record, I do not feel at all confident anything like this will
>>>> end up in swift.  This feature was proposed back in 2013, before Swift
>>>> was released, eventually accepted then not implemented because we were
>>>> out of time, then revised, then re-accepted and implemented, then ripped
>>>> out of the compiler because of various concerns about what it does to
>>>> the shape of the language (e.g. is this just a second version of
>>>> “mutating?”  What about classes?).  Based on history, I don't think it's
>>>> a sure bet, and I personally may be out of energy and time to fight for
>>>> it.  But we'll have to see...
>>>>
>>
>> Interesting -- I wasn't aware of the history of the proposal. I would
>> be very interested in revisiting it to get the consideration of the
>> larger Swift community. Is this something that would be reasonable in
>> the Swift 3 timeframe, or should this wait until we can discuss Swift
>> 4?
>
> Realistically, I think that proposal cannot be considered for Swift 3.

Understandable. FWIW, if one believes in autocomplete, superscript
equal sign is already a valid identifier head character (per
documentation and experimentation in a playground). So, if the gist of
the proposal is acceptable, one can already name a pair of functions
union() and union=() if the "=" is replaced with its superscript (and
for that matter, =union(), but autocomplete might not help with that
one). Not sure this idea will gain too much traction, but if the union
operator ∪ is being thrown out as a possibility, I thought I'd put it
out there.

In terms of symbols easily accessible on the keyboard not reserved for
operators, Xcode doesn't seem to complain about a function named
union$(), but that is a pretty bizarre-looking function name. More
horrifying than unioning() though?