[swift-evolution] [Proposal Draft] automatic protocol forwarding

[Matthew Johnson]

Sent from my iPad

> On Dec 31, 2015, at 11:53 AM, Dave Abrahams <dabrahams at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 31, 2015, at 9:47 AM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>>>> In the second example here Forwarder does conform to P.  The author of Forwarder has the flexibility to specify whether conformance is desired or not.
>>>>> 
>>>>> There are ways to handle that, including factoring the APIs of interest out of P and into a private protocol Q, then declaring the Forwardee’s conformance to Q.  Now, there’s an expressivity problem with our current access control system that you can’t use an internal or private protocol to provide public API, but that should be fixed separately.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm not sure where Q comes into play in this specific example.  The idea here is that forwarding implementations of all members of P are synthesized by the forward declaration.  It is left up to Forwarder to decide whether or not to declare actual conformance to P.  I am also confused by "then declaring the Forwardee’s conformance to Q" because we are discussing Forwarder's conformance here, not Forwardee’s.
>>> 
>>> Presumably both ends of the forwarding arrangement would have to conform to the same protocol, no?
>> 
>> No.  This is addressed in the proposal and the lazy collections motivating example I replied with last night.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to require this.
> 
> 
> My only point was that if we’re going to require the forwarder to conform, we may as well require it of the forwardee.  I realize that you don’t want to require either conformance.

There are independent reasons not to require it of the forwarded and the forwarder, so I disagree with "may as well".

It may be possible that eventually enough of the language limitations would be lifted that requiring conformance of both wouldn't restrict the power of a forwarding feature and as such that requirement wouldn't have any downsides other than the need to declare an additional conformance here or there.  

I would prefer to no artificially restrict the power of the feature without compelling reasons to do so.  

> 
> -Dave
> 
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