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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: 2) by BasilBrush on Tuesday June 03 2014, @10:19PM
Nice try. But you didn't use new lines to separate either, so by analogy with swift you'd need periods in the paragraph you wrote.
When using English in a form where a newline is a separator, such as a bullet pointed list, or title and subtitle, it is indeed common to not terminate each item with a period.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @10:59PM
FWIW I use punctuation in lists, eg
1) Thing a;
2) Thing b; and,
3) Thing c.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Wednesday June 04 2014, @03:25PM
You're doing it wrong.
But hey, just like English, Swift allows you to put those statement terminators in there if you really want.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!