Convert 'charlists' into ~c"charlists"

A thousand times yes, also for noobs trying to speak to erlang libs.

Think this would be a great change for newcomers to the language.
Even though it’s a matter of read the docs it is not consistent with other languages like you said, there is a reason for that but at the same time expected behaviour is good.

Thumbs up from me.

Amazing!

Definitely!

Personally I would like to vote for ~c(abc) instead. This would make many beginners think that ~c is “some kind of function”, so significant % of those should take a look at Kernel documentation at start before asking on forum/slack etc. sigil_c documentation would be then a “core/starting point of understanding the charlists”.

I believe we need to enhance said sigil_c documentation a lot. Even if it would not describes charlists in this @doc it still should point to a separate guide describing “what and why” is it.

can we then do

>>> 'someone once said: "Hello, World!" - and now we are stuck with it.'
'someone once said: "Hello, World!" - and now we are stuck with it.'

?

I can count on one hand the number of times when I wanted a list of printable ints to be shown as a charlist in the ~7 years I’ve been doing Elixir. Also in that time I’ve answered why it does that countless times to new people and in not one of those cases were they interacting with Erlang and needed it to be printed as text. I think the time has come to legitimately question whether this should still be the default given how easy it is to opt in to the behavior.

Love the change.

2. I think it is equally confusing. We’ll simply achieve changing of wording a bit in topics from newcomers, so instead of

why [97, 98, 99] prints ‘abc’?

we’ll have

why [97, 98, 99] prints ~c"abc"?

In order to avoid confusion at all, the list of integers should be printed as list of integers. In general, I don’t care. I don’t interact with charlists often.

I think we should start with IEx.configure(inspect: [charlists: :as_lists]) being the default (as @fuelen seems to be suggesting as well).

I vote for the sigil syntax as well – ~c"abc" and ~c(abc) should be identical, right?

I believe people carry implicit assumptions with them from other tech and that has been visible by the frankly infinite number of times people have come to the forum to ask about why does [97, 98, 99] show 'abc' in iex. So we should piggy-back on those assumptions and have the sigil syntax moving forward.

I love the idea.

1. The 'foobar' != "foobar" bit me quite a bit when I was learning Elixir. Being explicit about it will be a nice change for newcomers to the language.

2. Having [97, 98, 99] output to terminal also confused the hell out of me many many times. Seeing ~c"abc" in the terminal will be so much better for me and instantly tell me what I’m seeing.

I see it as a win/win for newcomers and veterans alike. Fantastic change @josevalim

If I’m not mistaken you could also do ~c'abc' for any (possibly imaginary) person that insists on a head nod to the past. But I think the question is a presentational one and ~c(abc) flags stronger in a beginner’s mind that “I might not have done something wrong”, though I do think the best solution is to just do charlists as the number lists. Also very much for prohibiting the use of single quotes (except in sigils) as an error moving forward, though a transitional deprecation warning is probably a good idea

It’s a good thing for newcomers who are using charlists by mistake when they don’t want to.

If you aren’t new and want to use charlists it seems slightly more annoying but not the biggest deal.