[swift-evolution] [Discussion]: Deprecate !-Unwrapping of Optionals

[Dave Abrahams]

on Sun Feb 28 2016, Developer <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> Optional values pervade Swift code and so there is a significant part
> of the language dedicated to manipulating them and using them safely.
> An optional value may be conditionally let-bound, guarded,
> pattern-matched on, given a default value with ??, or used with
> higher-order functions like map and flatMap without having to interact
> with partiality.  A corner case, however, remains in the form of the
> postfix-! force-unwrap operator.  At the term level, there is little
> reason to unwrap given the syntactic constructs above, and indeed code
> that does becomes brittle and, by its very nature, open to the dreaded
> "unexpectedly found nil while unwrapping an optional value" error (our
> very own NullPointerException).  

Whether ! is a problem depends how you use it.  IIUC it's very common
that you know an optional is non-nil unless there's a bug in your code.
In those cases, IMO, y! is far preferable in terms of maintainability to

  if let x = y {

  }
  else fatalError("...")

and in terms of both maintainability *and* reliability, is much better
than:

  if let x = y {

  }
  else {
     // supposed "recovery" code that never actually gets executed
  }

If people use y! to avoid dealing with cases that can actually arise in
correct code that's a problem, but I'm not sure taking away "y!" is the
cure.

-- 
-Dave