> I'd personally prefer calling it "Nil" (capital N), which really means > "nonexistent". The same way ObjC had "nil" for "id" and "Nil" for Class. > Possibly, to avoid confusion with nil, calling it Null? Though that might get > confused with NSNull, once the NS prefix gets dropped.
I don't think Nil or Null are good answers here. Whatever their dictionary definitions, they have specific meanings to programmers. (Actually, I could kind of see *lowercase* `nil`—the nil literal—being an okay option, if only because it would look bizarre. In that case, it would be indicating a lack-of-type. `Nil`, though, looks like it is the type of `nil`, and in many languages it is.) > Or "Nothing" as in Scala. I think `Nothing` suffers from a slightly less serious case of `None`: it looks like a sensible alternate word for `Void`. If you heard someone say a function "returns nothing", would you think that means it doesn't return, or that it returns but doesn't return any data? -- Brent Royal-Gordon Architechies _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
