Make the @ prefix on string object literals optional

Originator:bigzaphod
Number:rdar://11945420 Date Originated:July 24, 2012
Status:Closed (Nope) Resolved:April 8, 2013
Product:Developer Tools Product Version:
Classification: Reproducible:
 
I wish we could optionally eliminate the @ prefix for Objective-C string literals. It seems like in most cases the compiler should be able to infer when an object is being expected and do it for me automatically. For example:

NSString *str = @"blah";

The (NSString *) is right there! It should know! I should be able to say:

NSString *str = "blah";

Likewise, for the new dictionary indexing accessors, they only accept objects so it should be quite reasonable to convert what looks like a C string into an NSString automatically so the code looks better:

NSDictionary *myDict = [NSDictionary new];
myDict["key"] = value;

rather than this:
myDict[@"key"] = value;

which, IMO, looks ugly.

Comments

There are several cases where it doesn't work without the @. How would you make a C-String?

By lucasneiv4 at July 25, 2012, 7:34 a.m. (reply...)

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