[swift-evolution] My personal beef with leading-dot syntax

[Erica Sadun]

> On Apr 4, 2016, at 12:05 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> on Mon Apr 04 2016, Erica Sadun <swift-evolution at swift.org> asked:
> 
>> Can you ping me off-list or in another thread and explain what the
>> issues are?
> 
> All of the following make me uncomfortable with our leading-dot thang:
> 
> * The rules for lookup don't seem obvious to me.  I admit this is very
>  personal/subjective.

Indeed.

> * There is some evidence that people think it means something it doesn't
>  (“enum case”), as mentioned in SE-0036.  That suggests it is a
>  confusing feature.  That confusion may be fairly harmless so far, but
>  still.

Noted.

> * The dot doesn't seem to buy enough to be worth the complexity it adds
>  to the language; why not just let those names be looked up without the
>  dot?  You can always disambiguate with full qualification if you have
>  to.

I kind of like the enumeration looking like an enumeration but I get your point.

> * Static members generally are too verbose to access from within members
>  of a type (`Self.x` doesn't work; you have to write out
>  `TheFullTypeName.x`), and leading-dot doesn't give the ability to do
>  so. If we're going to have a special syntax for accessing static
>  members, it should *at least* solve this problem.
> 

Just happened to start a thread a little while ago:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.swift.evolution/13708 <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.swift.evolution/13708>

-- E


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