[swift-evolution] [Idea] "Add needless words" to Objective-C method names

[Douglas Gregor]

Hi all,

One interesting aspect of the Swift API guidelines is that the obvious mapping from Swift method names to Objective-C selectors produces poor method names for Objective-C code. For example, this

	func object(at index: Int) -> AnyObject { /* … */ }

will produce the Objective-C selector “objectAt:”, which is not great for Objective-C, where one rarely has a preposition at the end of a selector piece.

This will, in general, be an issue because the naming guidelines for Swift and Objective-C differ so much. We could potentially improve those cases where we have an argument label that ends in a preposition (like this example) by appending the parameter name when we’re forming the selector. For the object(at:) method above, it would produce the selector “objectAtIndex:”.

We would probably want to strip a leading article (a/an/the) from the parameter name, so that:

	func conforms(to aProtocol: Protocol) -> Bool { /* … */ }

ends up with the selector “conformsToProtocol:” (good) rather than “conformsToAProtocol:” (not so good).

The primary benefit to doing this is that we’ll produce slightly better Objective-C selectors in cases where we would be producing very bad ones (trailing prepositions are *rarely* used in Objective-C), so (potentially) fewer Swift methods will need to provide Objective-C method names explicitly via @objc(…).

The major downsides are that it is a breaking change for anyone using prepositions as argument labels now (and living with the poor Objective-C names) and that developers won’t be able to guess what Objective-C selector will be formed from a given Swift method without having read this message.

Thoughts?

	- Doug