[swift-evolution] Proposal: Add .times method to Integer type

[Chris Lattner]

> On Dec 18, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Radosław Pietruszewski <radexpl at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> My personal opinion on this is that 5.times { stuff} offers no benefits over “repeat 5 { stuff }”, so I’d rather see the later (if anything).
>> 
>> This is all shades of gray with no clear answer.  We generally want to have standard APIs pay for themselves and avoid confusion.  I agree with DaveA’s points upthread.  If you contrast it with forEach, forEach (barely!) pays for itself by allowing things like:
>> 
>> 	collection.forEach(curriedMethod)
>> 
>> That benefit doesn’t translate to “.times".
>> 
>> -Chris
> 
> Thanks for weighing in!
> 
> The benefit of `5.times` vs `repeat 5` is that the former is (and can easily be) defined in Swift, not as a language-level feature. OTOH `repeat 5` is a bit more useful because it allows returning/breaking/etc.
> 
> But I also understand the argument that this feature isn’t worth it at all. (There’s already a lot of libraries extending stdlib with things of this sort!)

It’s important to differentiate “not interesting” vs “not appropriate to include in the swift standard library”.  I love that you can express things like that directly in the language, and if someone felt compelled to do that in their own code (or in a SPM package someday) that would be fine with me.  It just shouldn’t (again, IMO) come with swift out of the box.

-Chris