[Coco] Swift

[Boisy G. Pitre]

I hesitate to start a long winding programming language advocacy topic, as this is the CoCo list. I’ll just provide my opinion and try to swing the topic back to the CoCo.

Swift is part of what I see as a new breed of “scripting-style compilable languages.” Its modern syntax reads more like a clean scripting language like Python or Ruby than what you would ascribe to cryptic languages like C or C++. It’s a language that emphasizes safety, as in not doing dumb things with pointers like writing over memory you don’t own, or garbling the stack with a stray pointer.

It’s also both an interpreted and compiled language and even has its own interactive REPL (read-eval-print-loop) where you can in real time, type in code and see it run without compiling. 

You can also write shell scripts in Swift.

So in short it’s a:

- compiled language
- interpreted language (using the REPL)
- shell script language

In short, I see C, C++, and Objective-C are languages of yesterday and today. Swift is a language of tomorrow.

Now, to swing this back to the CoCo:

Since Swift is now open source and Apple has released a compiler for Ubuntu, I expect we’ll see ports to Android, Windows, etc. Having one language which works in all of the above cases that I just mentioned AND can retarget to multiple major platforms is huge. Java does this, but it’s unwieldy JVM requirement makes it difficult. I think Swift can do this much more elegantly.

In fact, as time allows, I’m writing a new command line DriveWire server in Swift. That same code would then be easily transferable to a GUI based server.
—
Boisy G. Pitre
CoCo Projects Coordinator
http://www.cloud9tech.com <http://www.cloud9tech.com/>
http://www.nitros9.org <http://www.nitros9.org/>
http://sourceforge.net/projects/drivewireserver/ <http://sourceforge.net/projects/drivewireserver/>
http://sourceforge.net/projects <http://sourceforge.net/projects/drivewireserver/>/toolshed
http://liber809.blogspot.com <http://http//liber809.blogspot.com>
http://github.com/boisy/DriveWire-MacServer

> On Dec 4, 2015, at 7:12 AM, Steven Hirsch <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 3 Dec 2015, Tom Seagrove wrote:
> 
>> Now that Apple released Swift as Open Source at www.swift.org will we see CoCoSwift ???? Now THAT would be a feat.
> 
> For my own curiousity, why does the world need Yet Another New Language? Is there something about Swift that distinguishes it from the field?
> 
> 
> 
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