On Nov 9, 2017, at 11:36 AM, Kevin Ballard via swift-evolution
<swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 8, 2017, at 09:29 PM, Paul Cantrell via swift-evolution wrote:
>> The problem in the Doodads example is that the name flatMap is used to
>> identify two distinct intents: concatenating arrays and filtering nils. One
>> can argue that those two operations are, in some lofty abstract sense, if
>> you squint, two instances of some more general pattern — but I don’t think
>> it’s fair to say that they represent the same intent. These separate intents
>> deserve separate names.
>
> They absolutely represent the same intent if you think of an optional as a
> collection of zero or one elements.
>
> -Kevin Ballard
But as `Optional` does not conform to collection, I would suggest that the vast
majority of of developers do _not_ think of them as a collection of zero or one
elements. (I certainly don’t know any who naturally think of it that way.) We
don’t treat Optional as a collection anywhere else in the API, and it seems odd
to do so in just this one case.
-BJ
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