I used to agree with you, but it turns out taking ExpressibleByStringLiteral out of the text literal protocol hierarchy brings a lot of ABI issues with it, and in principle, let s:String = 'a' isn’t too different from let f:Float = 1. Complain all you want about the binary stability, but if you ask me it’s not worth fighting the ABI over this.
Early iterations of the proposal allowed exactly what you’re asking, but developers who use a lot of international text said there would be a lot of problems relating to unicode encoding once you get past U+0x7F. (literals that change value when you save the .swift file???) We think their concerns are valid, so we have the ASCII restriction.
We don’t really have to. I don’t care too much about the init(ascii:) initializer and that part can be omitted from the proposal without affecting anything else.
We don’t. it’s okay, i could have sworn we had one too lol. One draft of the proposal said specifically to add this exact operator to Character x Character but once you have 'a' + 'a' the next logical step is 'a' * 5, which of course brings us to 'a' * 'a' (???)