<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jan 6, 2016, at 10:30 AM, Don Wills <<a href="mailto:don.wills@portablesoftware.com" class="">don.wills@portablesoftware.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">1. The lack a Character type that are the constituent elements of a String</span><br style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">2. Missing methods (Java names used): valueOf, charAt, trim(), length(), </span></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div>No offense, but it sounds like you haven’t read the justifications in the Swift book or on the web. The short form: Unicode is complicated, necessarily so because human writing is complicated. Even the notion of a “character” is problematic. To quote from <a href="http://objc.io" class="">objc.io</a>'s (prerelease) <i class="">Advanced Swift</i> book: "But even when encoded using 32-bit code units, what a user might consider 'a single character' — as displayed on the screen — might require multiple code points composed together. Most string manipulation code exhibits a certain level of denial about Unicode’s variable-width nature. This can lead to some unpleasant bugs.”</div><div><br class=""></div><div>charAt isn’t available because a String is not just a simple “array of characters” as in older / more simplistic languages. Ditto with length.</div><div>valueOf IIRC is for converting to/from integers — there are methods on the integer types for that.</div><div>trim is one of those methods that is supplied in the Foundation framework, which hasn’t been ported to a Swift-native version yet so isn’t available outside Apple platforms.<br class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">getBytes(), toUpperCase(), toLowerCase()</span><br style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>getBytes is basically a UTF-8 view.</div><div>Upper/lowercase conversions are again part of Foundation.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">3. The lack of the + operator for appending</span><br style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>You can add this in a couple of lines of code if it’s important to you.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><span style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">4. The lack of a StringBuilder (Java again) class</span><br style="font-family: Alegreya-Regular; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;" class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">Apples and oranges. Java needs StringBuilder/StringBuffer because its String is always immutable. In Swift mutability is an aspect of the variable containing the String, so the String class itself contains mutating methods.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—Jens</div></body></html>