[mercury-users] Proposed change to char literal syntax

[Michael Day]

Hi Ralph,

> 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.

Well, I see it as similar to the way in which the standard library has a 
bunch of different functions all called init: one returns a map, one 
returns a bimap, one returns a bag... and yet if you use the wrong one, 
the compiler will let you know.

More specifically, I was trying to point out that if character literals 
were actually just function calls, then there would not need to be any 
special new syntax, as 'a' would still just be a quoted one letter 
symbol, that would resolve to :- func char.a = char assuming that you 
had imported the char module.

Cheers,

Michael

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