Constraint identifiers, a thought

[bencochran]

Constraint identifiers, a thought

[marcoarment]

Great idea, especially 2. And if identifiers don't need to be unique, it'd also be good to use the VFL string as the identifier for all constraints generated by VFL through CompactConstraint's functions, assuming autolayout doesn't already do this by default.

1 is indeed tricky. What characters are available? My initial thought is to use common line-comment syntax:

item1.attribute = item2.attribute + 10   # identifier

[bencochran]

Uniqueness doesn’t seem to be an issue (either according to documentation or in practice) so I like the idea of using the VFL when appropriate.

On syntax, I think I like the # as the identifier marker. It’s more obvious that it’s not a mathematical operation and also makes parsing quite a bit easier (e.g. no worrying about nesting parentheses).