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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 03 2014, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:03PM (#50827)

    I see :)

    I would note though that GP claimed 'losing an unnecessary punctuation character' made code cleaner; I was trying to argue by example by demonstrating that unnecessary punctuation, like periods, can make prose more readable.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by zsau on Wednesday June 04 2014, @11:45PM

    by zsau (2642) on Wednesday June 04 2014, @11:45PM (#51399)

    seeing as there is no convention of interpreting a capital letter as a separator (but there is a convention of interpreting a new line as a separator)

    and seeing as it's increasingly common to see newlines added in english prose even where paragraph boundaries had not been common

    (i've even seen it used in the middle of sentences, e.g. in a transcript of a British minister in a speech about Scottish independence)

    then really, if you're going to say "let's get rid of unnecessary english punctuation", it's capital letters and fullstops you'd be killing, replacing them with newlines boundaries

    both of which are not uncommon anyway: one day, all english prose might look like this