Re:Rust 1.17
by int_19h on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:53PM
(#14215846)
This particular convention is inherited from the ML family, where it has been very popular for a very long time.
For what it's worth, there are many cases even in the natural language where ' is not supposed to have a "closing" counterpart - indeed, the "it's" in this very sentence is one such example. Then you have the use of ' to denote feet and minutes of arc. Now, technically these are all actually different symbols, with their own Unicode codepoints etc - but in practice, people use ' for all of them, and it doesn't seem to be confusing anyone. You could treat the ' in Rust as something along these lines.
For what it's worth, there are many cases even in the natural language where ' is not supposed to have a "closing" counterpart - indeed, the "it's" in this very sentence is one such example. Then you have the use of ' to denote feet and minutes of arc. Now, technically these are all actually different symbols, with their own Unicode codepoints etc - but in practice, people use ' for all of them, and it doesn't seem to be confusing anyone. You could treat the ' in Rust as something along these lines.