[mercury-users] Proposed change to char literal syntax

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006, Michael Day wrote:

>>> which allows us to use ' ' as a UNICODE character literal if we feel so 
>>> inclined.
>> 
>> That doesn't strike me as a good thing...
>
> Why not?

' ' is a horrible name for anything.  See Ralph's message.

> You have to import the unicode module to access these functions, and you can 
> only use them when you're expecting a UNICODE codepoint, not a char, so they 
> don't conflict with anything.

Some things are legal, but it doesn't mean they're a good idea.

> If integer literals were customisable as well then Mercury could support 
> BigInteger literals and other number types transparently. Defining the 
> semantics of literal values in the library seems more elegant than 
> hard-wiring them.

I disagree.

Nick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
Post messages to:       mercury-users at csse.unimelb.edu.au
Administrative Queries: owner-mercury-users at csse.unimelb.edu.au
Subscriptions:          mercury-users-request at csse.unimelb.edu.au
--------------------------------------------------------------------------