Hi Slava,
I think we may be referring to different things. For whatever it’s worth, I
agree with your reasoning on all the points you brought up. I also don’t think
having a 'default: fatalError()’ case is a good idea because then a library
change can cause crashes in a running version of an application.
What I mean by some sort of ‘complete switch’ statement is that it would be
compiled as per a normal ‘switch’ but error at compile time if it’s not
complete against the known set of cases as compile time. Assuming an enum with
known cases [a, b] at compile time,
switch nonExhaustiveEnum {
case a:
print(“a”)
case b:
print(“b”)
default:
break
}
would be exactly equivalent to:
complete switch nonExhaustiveEnum {
case a:
print(“a”)
case b:
print(“b”)
unknown: // the ‘unknown’ case would only be required for
non-exhaustive enums
break
}
where the keywords ‘complete’ and ‘unknown’ are up for debate. If, however, the
programmer wrote:
complete switch nonExhaustiveEnum {
case a:
print(“a”)
unknown:
break
}
the compiler would give an error that there are unhandled cases in the switch
statement, whereas
switch nonExhaustiveEnum {
case a:
print(“a”)
default:
break
}
would compile without issue. If a user didn’t know about the existence of the
‘complete switch’ construct, they could just use normal ‘switch’ statements and
miss out on the completeness checking.
Thomas
> On 24/12/2017, at 1:15 PM, Slava Pestov wrote:
>
>
>
>> On Dec 23, 2017, at 3:47 PM, Thomas Roughton via swift-evolution
>> mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 24/12/2017, at 9:40 AM, Cheyo Jimenez via swift-evolution
>> mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>>>
>>> What are your thoughts on `final switch` as a way to treat any enum as
>>> exhaustible?
>>> https://dlang.org/spec/statement.html#FinalSwitchStatement
>>> <https://dlang.org/spec/statement.html#FinalSwitchStatement>___
>>> swift-evolution mailing list
>>> swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>>> <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
>>
>> I’d be very much in favour of this (qualms about the naming of the ‘final’
>> keyword aside - ‘complete’ or ‘exhaustive’ reads better to me).
>>
>> Looking back at the proposal, I noticed that something similar was mentioned
>> that I earlier missed. In the proposal, it says:
>>
>>> However, this results in some of your code being impossible to test, since
>>> you can't write a test that passes an unknown value to this switch.
>>
>> Is that strictly true? Would it be theoretically possible for the compiler
>> to emit or make accessible a special ‘test’ case for non-exhaustive enums
>> that can only be used in test modules or e.g. by a
>> ‘EnumName(testCaseNamed:)’, constructor? There is potential for abuse there
>> but it would address that particular issue.
>>
>> Regardless, I still feel something like a ‘final switch’ is necessary if
>> this proposal is introduced, and that it fits with the ‘progressive
>> disclosure’ notion; once you learn this keyword you have a means to check
>> for completeness, but people unaware of it could just use a ‘default’ case
>> as per usual and not be concerned with exhaustiveness checking.
>
> My general philosophy with syntax sugar is that it should do more than just
> remove a constant number of tokens. Basically you’re saying that
>
> final switch x {}
>
> just expands to
>
> swift x {
> default: fatalError()
> }
>
> I don’t think a language construct like this carries its weight.
>
> For example, generics have a multiplicative effect on code size — they
> prevent you from having to write an arbitrary number of versions of the same
> algorithm for different concrete types.
>
> Another example is optionals — while optionals don’t necessarily make code
> shorter, they make it more understandable, and having optionals in the
> language rules out entire classes of errors at compile time.
>
> On the other hand, a language feature that just reduces the number of tokens
> without any second-order effects makes code harder to read, the language
> harder to learn, and the compiler buggier and harder to maintain without much
> benefit. So I think for the long term health of the language we should avoid
> ‘shortcuts’ like this.
>
> Slava
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