[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Returned for revision] SE-0089: Renaming String.init<T>(_: T)

[Daniel Vollmer]

> On 27 May 2016, at 07:14, Patrick Smith via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 27 May 2016, at 2:40 PM, Austin Zheng via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Any of the NSObject subclass candidates may require their `description`s to be altered to meet the semantics, which may or may not be an acceptable breaking change.
> 
> Do you think it might be worth changing `description` to be named something else? Something more clear, less likely to conflict with ‘real’ properties — ‘description’ doesn’t seem to portray something that is value-preserving. What is the reason for calling it ‘description’?

I’m also not quite sure (from the suggested names) whether the intended use is to be “a string *description* that happens to be value-preserving” (for which the name description might be ok), or “a value-preserving version of the instance as string *with no intent of that string ever being descriptive or helpful when presented to anything other than the matching initialiser of the same type*” (which rather be one form of serialisation).

	Daniel.