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from the swift-language-but-not-so-swift-name dept.
Apple surprised the audience at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday with a tool that few attendees expected: a new programming language for iOS and OS X development called Swift (https://developer.apple.com/swift/). There already is a programming language called Swift (http://swift-lang.org/main/) that was developed by the National Science Foundation, some other government agencies, and the University of Chicago for use in parallel computing applications. This isn't that. What it is, is an entirely new syntax that -- in the words of Apple senior VP Craig Federighi, who unveiled it during the Monday morning WWDC keynote -- aims to be "Objective-C without the baggage of C."
Some of that "baggage" will already be familiar to developers who cut their teeth on C but later moved on to scripting languages such as Python (and Federighi compared Swift to Python several times during his presentation). Like scripting languages but unlike C, Swift lets you get straight to the point. The single line println("Hello, world") is a complete program in Swift. Note, also, that you don't even have to end the statement with a semicolon, as you do in C. Those are optional, unless you're combining multiple statements on a single line; i.e. a semi-colon is a statement separator rather than a statement terminator.
In addition to its online documentation, Apple has released an e-book, The Swift Programming Language, that's a free download (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-swift-programming-language/id881256329) from the iBooks Store. To start working with the language itself, you'll need to download the beta release of XCode 6 (https://developer.apple.com/xcode/downloads/), which includes tutorials to get you going.
(Score: 3, Informative) by theluggage on Tuesday June 03 2014, @05:46PM
Uh - my guess at a boring answer? I guess its because Swift source code supports Unicode: e.g. you can have Greek letters as variable names (or emoticons, but then you'd really have to be shot for the good of humanity). That means there is a single formal definition [wikipedia.org] of what characters count as line terminators.
Just be thankful that's as far as they ventured down the road to hell that is significant whitespace, or we could have had another Python on our hands...