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

[John McCall]

> On Jun 2, 2016, at 2:05 PM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 2, 2016 at 3:46 PM, John McCall via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 1:43 PM, Russ Bishop <xenadu at gmail.com <mailto:xenadu at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> On Jun 2, 2016, at 11:30 AM, John McCall via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto: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.

Yes, I think that it is clear that, even if we added a property on all types, it would not be acceptable to name that property something like "size"; it would have to be something longer like "storageSize".

John.

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