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If you’re not yet totally sick of hearing me talk… part 3 of my interview on the ADSP podcast is up, where we talk about variadic templates, std::variant, and (finally!) some Swift: https://www.adspthepodcast.com/2024/05/17/Episode-182.html
I did a bit of digging on the digit separators issue, and I think I have reconstructed what happened. Digit separators came in to the meeting with a couple of different possible syntaxes: underscores (like Swift has) would have been preferred (e.g., 1_000_000), but they conflicted with user-defined literals on hexadecimal literals (0x1000_beef is ambiguous).
So the syntax changed to use spaces as digit separators (e.g., 1 000 000), and I think that’s what was coming up for a vote. Some Clang folks (including myself) noticed an ambiguity with Objective-C’s message send syntax while trying to implement it (yes, at or near the bar; compiler people are weird), and alerted the committee. Digit separators did not pass at that meeting.
Eventually, C++ got digit separators with the tick (e.g., 1’000’000). It’s unambiguous, albeit a bit ugly IMO. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used in practice.
[Edit: I was wrong! See the real answer at https://sfba.social/@dgregor79/112474813816673255]