> On Jun 2, 2016, at 1:43 PM, Russ Bishop <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 11:30 AM, John McCall via swift-evolution
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>> I still think the value-based APIs are misleading and that it would be
>> better to ask people to just use a type explicitly.
>>
>> John.
>
>
> I agree; in fact why aren’t these properties on the type itself? The type is
> what matters; why can’t the type just tell me it’s size?
> Having free functions or magic operators seems to be another holdover from C.
>
>
> Int.size
> Int.alignment
> Int.spacing
>
> let x: Any = 5
> type(of: x).size
>
>
> The compiler should be able to statically know the first three values and
> inline them. The second is discovering the size dynamically.
Two reasons. The first is that this is a user-extensible namespace via static
members, so it's somewhat unfortunate to pollute it with names from the
library. The second is that there's currently no language mechanism for adding
a static member to every type, so this would have to be built-in. But I agree
that in the abstract a static property would be preferable.
John.
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