Project Elvis

[Michael]

On Friday, 10 November 2017 at 05:23:53 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On 11/6/17 12:20, Michael wrote:
>>[...]
>
> You're right, I didn't, that was intentional, because sometimes 
> people write things like that. And it took a while for anyone 
> to say anything about it. That is my point.
>
> But that's the thing. The ?? is significantly more obvious in 
> the condensed version.
>
> This is something that a UX designer would recognize instantly, 
> but human factors are very definitely not our strong skill as 
> engineers. FWIW, my human factors experience comes from the 
> deep study of airline crashes that I do as a pilot.
>
>>[...]
>
> Two things. ?: is ALSO a change a to language (lexer+parser). 
> As to the whole "it's no more likely to typo the colon than the 
> question" argument, sure, but that depends on the keyboard 
> layout more than anything else, what works for you may not work 
> elsewhere. And in either case, it's an easy compiler error. So 
> you don't win anything with the ?:, but you win readability 
> with the ??. MSFT spends a LOT of time studying these things. 
> It would be wise to learn for free from the money they spent.

This is fair, though do we know Microsoft actually put research 
into their choice on this matter? Either way, it would be a nice 
addition, and my preference is for ?: but I'm sure the best case 
will win the others over.