<div dir="ltr"><blockquote type="cite" style="color:rgb(80,0,80);font-size:12.800000190734863px">So yeah, solution is to make characters easier to type, not modify the language.<br><br></blockquote><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000">+1 to that: what about having editors which provide a graphical access to such characters just as LaTeX editors give access to maths symbols and some functions? The equation editors of other softwares (e.g. recent MS Word version) also have quite usable way to provide such functionalities</font></span><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000">-1 on the original proposal itself otherwise (sorry)</font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px">I don't think that ' is a character to consider for identifiers. I see basically two options for such a character:</span><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px">1) as delimiter (which is what is the most spread use of it, I think, in programming languages)</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px">2) as an operator</span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></span></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px">Actually both options might not be mutually exclusive: for instance MATLAB uses ' both as string delimiter and as transpose postfix operator.</span></font></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></span></div><div><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px">I would personally see the benefit of using ' as operator and could imagine (in addition to the aforementioned MATLAB use of the</span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px"> postfix operator to transpose / conjugate transpose matrices) using it as differentiation operator on pure functions </span><span style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-size:12.800000190734863px">with respect to their input variables. It could be using options to automatically make finite difference based differentiation of any function or closure but I could even imagine it combined with an automatic differentiation scheme at compile-time! This would be such a great addition to a language with functional programming capabilities for scientists and engineers.</span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000">I admit that these are heavily math/science-oriented uses, but why not?</font></span></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000">I can't think of any wide-spread use of ' as prefix or infix operator in other languages.</font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000"><br></font></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><font color="#000000">Nicolas</font></span></div><div><font color="#500050"><span style="font-size:12.800000190734863px"><br></span></font></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 6:28 PM, Georgios Moschovitis via swift-evolution <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" target="_blank">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Interesting background, I wasn’t aware of that.<br>
<br>
George.<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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