On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 3:46 PM, John McCall via swift-evolution < [email protected]> wrote:
> 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]> 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. > In the earlier conversation, it was pointed out (by Dave A., I think?) that examples such as Array.size show how this solution can get confusing. And even though there aren't fixed-length arrays in Swift, those may come one day, making the syntax even more confusing.
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