Syntactic sugar: char literal that automatically converts the unicode value to a u32

Feature Request

Overview

Using a full-blown string in WASM is overkill if you just want to compare a single character to another value. A char literal would help.

Impact

Medium. It’s very convenient - without it one would have to resort to manually inserting unicode values.

Due Date

How hard is it to implement? I don’t know the Walt compiler stack. But if it’s in JavaScript, then it should boil down to identifying a single-character, calling codePointAt(0) to get the integer value, and ensuring it is assigned to an i32, no?

[xtuc]

It’s maybe an implementation detail but it’s simpler IMO to add a rule in the type inference.

According to the definition above,

assignment -> identifier : type = string | char;

The type is independent of what’s on the right side, so that would require a condition in the parser and you wouldn’t be able to catch the error in:

function f(c: char) {}

f("ab")
f("a")

[JobLeonard]

Oh right, I forgot that Walt has static type support 😛