> On Dec 21, 2017, at 9:49 AM, Ignacio Soto via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I think I speak for the entire Swift community when I say that Swift's enums, 
> together with the ability to switch over them exhaustively and having 
> compile-time guarantees, is one of the best features in Swift. I'm regularly 
> annoyed by this when writing other languages like Java and JS (default: throw 
> new IllegalArgumentException();)
> 
> Now, that's not to say I don't understand why this proposal is necessary. I 
> totally get it, and the existing decisions make a lot of sense to me. But I'd 
> like us to introduce this while maintaining the ability to guarantee 
> exhaustive switch statements, no matter how the enum was defined.
> 
> Example: imagine a theoretical SampleKit defines:
> public enum E {
> case A
> case B
> }
> 
> It's implicitly non-exhaustive, possibly because the author was not aware of 
> the default (which would likely happen often), or possibly because they made 
> a conscious decision, as they expect to expand the cases in the future.
> 
> In my app, I use SampleKit and decide that I want to make sure I handle all 
> cases:
> 
> switch e {
> case A: break
> case B: break
> default: break // This becomes necessary
> }
> 
> As the proposal stands right now, I'm forced to handle any future cases. 
> That's fine. What's not fine in my opinion, is that in doing so I lose the 
> ability to keep this exhaustiveness moving forward. If I update SampleKit to 
> v2.0, I want to know at compile-time if there are new cases I need to be 
> aware of (instead of going to some generic handling path). Instead, I’m left 
> in the same place I would in other languages like Java or JS:
> 
> // No error :(
> switch e {
> case A: break
> case B: break
> default: break
> }
> 
> Proposed Solution
> 
> What I’m proposing is that we introduce a new keyword, unknown (or a better 
> name), that serves as a way to handle cases that aren’t yet known, but not 
> those that are.
> 
> // Error: missing case C
> switch e {
> case A: break
> case B: break
> unknown: break // Would handle future cases
> }
> 

What are your thoughts on `final switch` as a way to treat any enum as 
exhaustible?
https://dlang.org/spec/statement.html#FinalSwitchStatement


> With this, you shouldn’t be able to use default AND unknown at the same time, 
> as default implicitly includes unknown.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you can consider this change (or some 
> variation of it).
> 
> Nacho Soto
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