That’s not great, very true. But it’s imo still a lot better than 'abc', which to a new elixir developer likely just means “string”. At best they find one of the many “list turned string” topics on the forum or they might find a lot or irrelevant information about binaries.
LostKobrakai
0
MrFlorius
I think there should be an options for printing charlists as lists, as erlang strings and both.
It might be useful when using erlang libs.
0
brettbeatty
If the goal is just to make charlists as accessible as possible to newcomers, I like the idea of making the default inspection of charlists show both the list form and what it looks like as a charlist:
iex> 'some text'
[115, 111, 109, 101, 32, 116, 101, 120, 116] #'some text'
I’m not sure the implications of having an inspected form that is half-comment, but I feel like something like that would make it very clear what’s going on. It would be a little verbose, but more experienced folks could just configure it to something else.
This isn’t mutually exclusive with embracing the sigil form, either.
3
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
What I remember is that we discussed this very early on: https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/_pAjPEayLLI/m/kIyPG8HtAQAJ
And it was abandoned because rewriting everything manually, at least in the Elixir codebase, was too cumbersome. The formatter solves that. 
3
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
~c is not valid syntax but h ~c/anything/ will work, with any enclosing, from Elixir v1.14. And there is also the i helper.
2
dimitarvp
Eiji
Is that a part of first release candidate, master branch or still only planned? If it’s part of release candidate then it does not work in my asdf environment:
$ iex
Erlang/OTP 25 [erts-13.0.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [ds:8:8:10] [async-threads:1] [jit:ns]
Interactive Elixir (1.14.0-rc.0) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)> h ~c/anything/
The "h" helper expects a Module, Module.fun or Module.fun/arity, got: 'anything'
If instead of accessing documentation you would like more information about a value or about the result of an expression, use the "i" helper instead
Edit: I found it working on master branch using master-otp-25 from asdf.
Also can’t compiler solve ~c by expanding having in mind that’s doing same thing with variables?
warning: variable "example" does not exist and is being expanded to "example()", please use parentheses to remove the ambiguity or change the variable name
0
joisig
I’m not strongly opposed. However, Elixir to date has largely avoided changes that introduce “churn” to existing codebases except when really required for big important changes, and I for one have loved that about the ecosystem.
Even if the changes required are more or less automatic due to leveraging the formatter, this update to Elixir would still add another thing to do for any older codebases before it can compile with a newer version of Elixir. Should be fine for a lot of software, but imagine for example some piece of code sitting on GitHub that has simply been “done” for a while, the maintainer is no longer really active, etc. This update might mean lots of otherwise unnecessary forks of such a library.
The current difference between double and single quotes seems like a small one-time thing that takes a couple of minutes out of your initial Elixir learning experience to get through. Not all languages need to be the same or meet novices’ expectations, and there are other things that will tend to break expectations and can’t reasonably be changed (for example, every statement returning what it evaluates and thus no need for an explicit “return” keyword).
I do think better help for charlists in IEx would be great.
3
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
This is not a breaking change. Old code will still work fine, albeit with a warning, and effective support for single quotes would be removed only in 2.0, which would be several years from now (if it happens).
6