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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 HiThere on Wednesday June 04 2014, @12:10AM
Pascal doesn't handle utf-8 any better than does C. It's difficult to write parallel programs. Etc.
OTOH, if Pascal had been reasonably updated I think it would have been an excellent language.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:58AM
Did you ever take a look at Objective Pascal/Delphi?
But yes, Pascal suffers from a delay before features of other languages reach it. (Then again, Ada suffers from that its features doesn't get popular until another language implements it - so being updated/first isn't always a good thing)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 05 2014, @09:34AM
Actually the Extended Pascal standard suffered mostly from not being implemented by many compilers. Maybe it was an error to publish it as separate standard instead of as update to the Pascal standard, but then, most Pascal compilers already largely ignored the Pascal standard anyway, and on the other hand, C++ later proved that you can be successful with a new standard based on an existing one.