[swift-evolution] [Proposal Draft] Flexible memberwise initialization

[Alex Johnson]

Hopefully this is still the right place to discuss this proposal (it's listed
as being in active review
<https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/schedule.md>, but I
don't see a separate [Review] thread).

I like this proposal. I think it will bring some much-needed ease-of-use.

I'm not sold on the "..." placeholder for the memberwise arguments, though.
I know this was suggested by Chris Lattner, so I'm tempted to defer to his
judgement. But here are my thoughts:

First, it's very close to the varags syntax (e.g. "Int...") which can also
appear in initializer argument lists.

Second, and I think more important, I'm not sure that it's all that *useful*.
Aside from being used to mark the initializer as having "memberwise"
semantics, which is already done by the "memberwise" keyword, the most
common example I've seen is code like this:

memberwise init(customArg: Int, ...) {
  /* use customArg */
}


That is, it's used to indicate where the synthesized arguments appear in
the argument list if there are also custom (non-memberwise) arguments.

My question is, *why not always put the memberwise arguments last?* That
would eliminate the need for the placeholder (aka "...").

I don't think I've seen a compelling case for embedding the "..." *within* a
list of custom arguments, like:

memberwise init(customArg1: Int, ..., customArg2: Int) {
  /* use customArg1 and customArg2 */
}


And it's been mentioned several times that this is purely additive. If
there *is* an obscure case where that is useful, the author can write use
manual initialization.


On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 6:48 AM, Thorsten Seitz via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Ok, that makes sense.
>
> -Thorsten
>
> > Am 03.01.2016 um 00:24 schrieb Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com>:
> >
> >
> >> On Jan 2, 2016, at 2:48 PM, Thorsten Seitz <trsfoo at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> One question just occurred to me: do we really need the keyword
> „memberwise“ anymore? Wouldn’t just using "init(…)“ be sufficient?
> >
> > It wouldn’t be necessary to make the parser work, but I think we’d want
> something to make it clear what was intended.  Otherwise, you could write:
> >
> >    init(a : Int, …)
> >
> > when you meant:
> >    init(a : Int …)
> >
> > and unfortunate things would happen.  The memberwise keyword also makes
> it much more clear to the reader what is going on.
> >
> > -Chris
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>



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