Seems that I misunderstood, I thought part of the motivation was to allow strings (binaries) to be represented using single quotes as in other languages. If it’s not a breaking change then I see no downsides to it. Thanks for the clarification!
joisig
Qqwy
TypeCheck Core Team
Yes, I think it would improve learning (a lot) and user experience (slightly) if there were clear warnings for single quotes.
To be honest, equally confusing.
0
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
No problem, my initial message was not as clear as it could have been. 
Single quotes would warn for now and likely have no use whatsoever in future versions.
1
Onor.io
I think this would be a good change as it would help to remove a point of confusion that some folks new to the language seem to stumble over quite a bit – the difference between charlists and binaries being a little more subtle than perhaps it should be.
Good idea!
1
arathunku
Hello, I found this thread after getting charlist printed again in test failures. Is there any way to change the default, globally, everywhere, including tests? I’ve found IEx.configure(inspect: [charlists: :as_lists]) but it’s not enough.
More context: I’m working with NimbleParser, parsing text with a lot of integers, as values, example "80-90 HR" and I’m currently converting this into a tuple as {80, 90, "HR"} just to avoid it being printed with ~c"".
1
zachallaun
There may be a better way, but I think you could do this with Inspect.Opts.default_inspect_fun/1 by modifying the inspect opts that are passed.
1
arathunku
Thank you! I’ve totally missed this new method in v1.13
$ iex
Erlang/OTP 25 [erts-13.2.2.3] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [ds:8:8:10] [async-threads:10] [jit:ns]
Interactive Elixir (1.15.5) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)> previous_fun = Inspect.Opts.default_inspect_fun()
&Inspect.inspect/2
iex(2)> Inspect.Opts.default_inspect_fun(fn
...(2)> value, opts ->
...(2)> opts = Map.put(opts, :charlists, :as_lists)
...(2)> previous_fun.(value, opts)
...(2)> end)
:ok
iex(3)> IO.inspect([?a, ?b])
[97, 98]
[97, 98]
1
mneumann
OT, but ideally, Elixir libraries would state which language version they were written for, so future versions of Elixir could do some on-the-fly transformation or at worst, emit a compiler error.
0
KP123
Could backticks, like in JavaScript’s template literal syntax, be used instead of a sigil? No technical reasons, just aesthetics. I find `charlist` cleaner than ~c”charlist”, it’s fewer characters too.
Then we end up with something like:
“” - binaries
‘’ - binaries OR deprecate to increase contrast between binary and charlist delimiters
`` - charlists
0
benwilson512
Author of Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe
The challenge here isn’t really about creating charlists, the ~c sigil does that just fine. The issue is that if you have a value in your code and you IO.inspect that value, there is unavoidable ambiguity about whether to display it as a list of ints or a char list because there is no attribute in that value that says “I am a charlist”.
0