[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0067: Enhanced Floating Point Protocols

[Xiaodi Wu]

+1 to Tony's write-up.

On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 10:47 Tony Allevato via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> That seems like a purely syntactic concern that could potentially be
> addressed in other ways, though. I'm not sure the choice of "duplicate all
> operators using verbosely-named methods" is the best one for the reasons I
> mentioned above, and the question of "how do we cleanly unify operators
> with other protocol requirements?" seems out-of-scope and orthogonal to
> this proposal.
>
> Given that we already have existing cases in the language where operators
> are declared within protocols (`Equatable` being the first one that comes
> to mind), I would recommend that this proposal follow that pattern for
> consistency and then the community continue a separate discussion about
> operators in protocols, which may or may not lead to changes across the
> entire language and standard library. The protocol operators discussion
> feels like a much larger topic that deserves to be discussed in its own
> right without bogging down the rest of this proposal.
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 8:18 AM David Sweeris <davesweeris at mac.com> wrote:
>
>> I’m with Nicola on this one. Operators are currently odd in that they
>> have to be declared globally. Everything else about protocol conformance is
>> kept within the conforming type.
>>
>> - Dave Sweeris
>>
>>
>> On Apr 26, 2016, at 9:28 AM, Tony Allevato via swift-evolution <
>> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 2:57 AM Nicola Salmoria via swift-evolution <
>> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>
>>> > > func isEqual(to other: Self) ->Bool
>>> > > func isLess(than other: Self) ->Bool
>>> > > func isLessThanOrEqual(to other: Self) ->Bool
>>> >
>>> > I'm still not sure why these are methods instead of operators.
>>>
>>> I think this is an *excellent* choice, and I hope it is the first step
>>> to completely removing operators from protocols.
>>>
>>> IMHO throwing operators into protocols is inconsistent and confusing.
>>> Having regular methods and a single generic version of the operator that
>>> calls down on the type’s methods is clearer and guarantees that generic
>>> code can avoid ambiguities by calling the methods directly, instead of
>>> having to rely only on heavily overloaded global operators.
>>>
>>
>> I personally disagree on this point. To me, a protocol describes a set of
>> requirements for a type to fulfill, which includes things other than
>> methods. Just as a protocol can define initializers, properties, and
>> associated types that a type must define in order to conform, it makes
>> sense that a protocol would also define which operators a conforming type
>> must support.
>>
>> Introducing a mapping between names and operators poses a few problems:
>>
>> – IMO, they are overly verbose and add noise to the definition. This
>> makes the language look less clean (I'm getting visions of NSDecimalNumber).
>> – They expose two ways to accomplish the same thing (writing
>> `x.isEqual(to: y)` and `x == y`).
>> – Do certain operators automatically get mapped to method names with
>> appropriate signatures across all types, or does a conforming type still
>> have to provide that mapping by implementing the operators separately? If
>> it's the latter, that's extra work for the author of the type writing the
>> protocol. If it's the former, does it make sense to automatically push
>> these operators for all types? Should any type that has an `add` method
>> automatically get `+` as a synonym as well? That may not be desirable.
>>
>> I'm very supportive of the floating-point protocol proposal in general,
>> but I feel the arithmetic and comparison operations should be exposed by
>> operators alone and not by methods, where there is a suitable operator that
>> has the intended meaning.
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> —
>>> Nicola
>>>
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>>>
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