[swift-evolution] [proposal] Either in the Swift Standard Library

[Rob Mayoff]

>
> Just added a section of motivating examples to the Either proposal.  Ping
> me if you have any more that I missed ('cause I'm sure I did miss a lot).
>
>
> https://github.com/typelift/swift-evolution/blob/either-or/proposals/0024-either.md#motivating-examples
>
>
Your motivating examples (including all the projects you linked except "Any
many more") overwhelmingly use the Either (or similar type) to represent
success/failure. I'm not sure there's a single example where the names Left
and Right actually make sense in the problem domain. I'm not 100% sure
about func alternate in Madness/Alternation.swift. It definitely uses
Left/Right to mean Failure/Result, but I couldn't tell if it also uses them
as something else. Which makes those names all the more maddening.

I checked my company's largest Scala project, which is over 300,000 lines.
We use Scala's Try/Success/Failure in dozens of places. We use
Either/Left/Right once, in a thrown-together report-generating script,
which would probably have been written in awk or perl if it didn't need to
read binary log files. (The ability of IntelliJ to reliably find all uses
of a class or method is not to be underestimated. Hint hint, team Xcode.)

I think a Result/Success/Failure type is warranted, but I'm very skeptical
about generic Either/Left/Right.
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