[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Renaming sizeof, sizeofValue, strideof, strideofValue

[Tony Allevato]

Given that these are fairly low-level values with very specialized uses, I
definitely agree that they should be somehow namespaced in a way that
doesn't cause us to make very common words unusable for our users.

Even size(of:) seems more general to me than I'd like. I'd like to see the
word "memory" as part of the name somehow, whether it's a wrapping type or
a function prefix of some sort. These values are specialized; we don't need
to optimize typing them, IMO.

On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 2:06 PM Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 3:46 PM, John McCall via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 1:43 PM, Russ Bishop <xenadu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 11:30 AM, John McCall via swift-evolution <
>> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>
>> I still think the value-based APIs are misleading and that it would be
>> better to ask people to just use a type explicitly.
>>
>> John.
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree; in fact *why aren’t these properties on the type itself*? The
>> type is what matters; why can’t the type just tell me it’s size?
>> Having free functions or magic operators seems to be another holdover
>> from C.
>>
>>
>>     Int.size
>>     Int.alignment
>>     Int.spacing
>>
>>     let x: Any = 5
>>     type(of: x).size
>>
>>
>> The compiler should be able to statically know the first three values and
>> inline them. The second is discovering the size dynamically.
>>
>>
>> Two reasons.  The first is that this is a user-extensible namespace via
>> static members, so it's somewhat unfortunate to pollute it with names from
>> the library.  The second is that there's currently no language mechanism
>> for adding a static member to every type, so this would have to be
>> built-in.  But I agree that in the abstract a static property would be
>> preferable.
>>
>
> In the earlier conversation, it was pointed out (by Dave A., I think?)
> that examples such as Array.size show how this solution can get confusing.
> And even though there aren't fixed-length arrays in Swift, those may come
> one day, making the syntax even more confusing.
>
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20160602/6ad17ec6/attachment-0001.html>