> On Oct 2, 2017, at 10:56 PM, John Payne via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > > Chris Lattner wrote: > >> Just FWIW, IMO, these make sense as operators specifically because they are >> commonly used by math people as operations that transform the thing they are >> attached to. Superscript 2 is a function that squares its operand. That >> said, perhaps there are other uses that I’m not aware of which get in the >> way of the utilitarian interpretation. > > But there are SO MANY uses for superscripts, subscripts, and other such > annotations, and they are all context specific, just in math, without getting > into chemistry, physics, statistics, and so forth. > > They’re really more like methods on the object to which they’re attached, or > the combination of a method and an argument.
I agree. > Wouldn’t classing them as identifiers lend itself better to this? No, making them an operator is better for this usecase. You want: x² to parse as “superscript2(x)” - not as an identifier “xsuperscript2” which is distinct from x. -Chris _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
