[swift-evolution] isEqual to replace == Equatable Requirement

[Ling Wang]

That'll be great!



    _____________________________
From: Joe Groff via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 8, 2015 11:57 AM
Subject: Re: [swift-evolution] isEqual to replace == Equatable Requirement
To: Richard Fox <fox.ios.dev at gmail.com>
Cc:  <swift-evolution at swift.org>


       Long term we'd like to make it so that operators can be methods of their operand types, either instead of or in addition to being globals. That seems like a better way of addressing these concerns.     
       -Joe       
                  On Dec 8, 2015, at 2:01 AM, Richard Fox via swift-evolution <      swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:          
                  Hi all,
       

I would like to propose changing the Equatable protocol to use isEqual(to:Self) -> Bool, defined inside of a type to replace the currently used operator == function, which is defined outside of the type.       Reasoning:               Having the conforming function defined inside of the type is more intuitive, since in general functions required for conformance are defined within the type. It feels like an unnecesary detail for learners of Swift to have to stumble through.              

The implementation for this would look something like this:            public protocol Equatable{       ....       /// Shortcut for defining `==` function inside type definition.       @warn_unused_result       func isEqual(to:Self) -> Bool     }     @warn_unused_result     public func == <T : Equatable>(lhs: T, rhs: T) -> Bool {         return lhs.isEqual(rhs)     }       Impact on Existing Code:       

This implementation would break existing code, but could be fixed with a default protocol extension such as:            /// Default `isEqual` function to satisfy other types only definiting     /// `==` for equality.     public extension Equatable{         func isEqual(to:Self) -> Bool{             return self == to         }     }                 Not adding the default function for         isEqual makes more sense to me though, since it would remove any strict requirement for Equatable conformance and leave no warning for the loop you would create by implementing neither         isEqual nor         ==.        
        
Regards,        
Rich Fox                     _______________________________________________      
swift-evolution mailing list      
      swift-evolution at swift.org      
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution      
               
        


  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20151209/9af56449/attachment.html>