Single Quoted Character Literals (Why yes, again)

[xwu (Xiaodi Wu)]

@johnno1962

The first thing I want to say is the #1 guiding principle for the implementation from which the proposal is derived is that it is a compile time feature and does not require any new support from the language runtime. As such, new protocols, conformances or types and re-inventing or coming up with a parallel treatment of single Quoted literals is out of the question.

I think the feedback you're getting is that an adequate exploration of the design space (which is what the pitch phase is about) will need to wrestle with these options. I don't see how it can be justified to start with ruling these options out as the "#1 guiding principle." Clearly, there is an appetite to discuss these topics.

@johnno1962

With regard to the second identity if you introduce the integer conformances 'x' + 'y' == 241 and related absurdities it is only possible to defend this by mentioning C and Java have co-existed with this tenant for decades

This is the core team's feedback on moving forward that point (emphasis mine):

@Ben_Cohen

Expressing integer types with character literals

This was the cause of the majority of disagreement during the review. Once single-quoted literals have been added to the language, this part of the proposal (or an alternative, such as the addition of a trapping or nil-returning ascii property) can be re-pitched separately.