Proposal to deprecate and remove symbol literals

[AMatveev]

@tarsa

No other popular statically typed language has this

I will be very happy to have

@odersky

One issue is how to define a syntax for general numeric literals N without mentioning the result type. One candidate syntax would be:

• a digit 0-9
• followed by a sequence of digits or letters,
• which can also contain one or more '_'s, if followed by a digit or letter,
• which can also contain one or more '.'s if followed by a digit.

So it will be posible to write:

1.5.nn \\instead of "1.5".nn

But I would prefer:

• a digit 0-9 or escape
• followed by a sequence of digits or letters,
• which can also contain one or more '_'s, if followed by a digit or letter,
• which can also contain one or more '.'s if followed by a digit or escape.

I understand that scala has very low freedom choosing escape character.
But I will miss it …