[mercury-users] Proposed change to char literal syntax

[Ralph Becket]

Nicholas Nethercote, Thursday,  5 October 2006:
> On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Michael Day wrote:
> 
> >However, if single quotes can still be used in other contexts then it 
> >seems that the compiler would still need to be able to resolve the 
> >ambiguity somehow. For example, we have a function like this:
> >
> >:- func (' ') = unicode.
> >
> >(' ') = unicode(0x20).
> >
> >which allows us to use ' ' as a UNICODE character literal if we feel so 
> >inclined.
> 
> That doesn't strike me as a good thing...

I agree.  In my experience, I usually start off thinking of using tricks
like this (although nothing as adventurous as this example), but
inevitably end up using longer, more meaningful names, such as
unicode_space.  It makes things much less confusing and error prone in
the long run; the extra typing is more than compensated for by the
reduced debugging effort.

-- Ralph
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