[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky]

I had read the discussion live as it happened. And just now I went back to
see Jaden’s posts again: there are only a handful, and all are quite brief.
To the extent that they “sketched a direction”, I would say no. We should
instead base the proposal on ideas laid out by Dave Abrahams, Brent
Royal-Gordon, Ben Cohen and several others.

Furthermore, we emphatically do *not* need to make the distinction you
claim between “infinite” and “incomplete” ranges, which *is* needless
hairsplitting.

We (meaning Swift Evolution) can define any semantics we like for any
operator we like. The simple, elegant, intuitive behavior for one-sided
ranges is exactly the “do what I mean” approach as described by many people
including Dave Abrahams.

Want to subscript a collection using a one-sided range? Great! If the fixed
bound is inside the collection then go as far as possible (ie. from start
or to end), and if it is outside then trap for index out of bounds.

Want to zip together integers and sequence elements? Great! If the sequence
eventually ends then stop when it does, and if not then trap when the
integer overflows.

Want to iterate over a one-sided range? Well if the upper end is open then
great! “for i in 20...” will loop until it hits a “break” or trap on
overflow. We could probably even make “for i in (...20).reversed” work and
count down, though we don’t have to.

In any case, the point remains: if we do add one-sided ranges, we can
define any behavior we want for them. And given the opinionated nature of
Swift, it follows that we should choose to make them expressive, useful,
and enjoyable.

Nevin


On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com>
wrote:

>
> > On Feb 1, 2017, at 9:52 AM, Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky <
> nevin.brackettrozinsky at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Drafting a proposal sounds like a good idea, to establish all the
> relevant information in one place. I don’t recall off the top of my head
> what directions Jaden sketched out, but as long as the proposal hits the
> high points of the uses and benefits, and summarizes the discussion and
> alternatives, it should be fine.
> >
> > I might suggest using Chris’s terminology of “one-sided range”, because
> that is both more precise and it renders moot all the “incomplete” vs
> “infinite” hairsplitting.
>
> I recommend reading through the discussion Xiaodi and I had yesterday,
> which Jaden chimed in on.  We really do need to make a distinction between
> incomplete and infinite ranges if we want to support all of the use cases
> with clean semantics.  This isn’t hair splitting.
>
> >
> > Nevin
>
>
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