[swift-evolution] Suppress unused result warnings on try? if attempted statement does not return

[Jonathan Cotton]

I propose that the compiler warnings for unused results are removed from try? if the statement being ‘tried’ does not return itself. This is inline with how try works and although try? does have a possible return value itself (nil) the warning isn’t adding/helping any if the result is either going to be nil or void.

When try? is used in this way, it is essentially the caller saying they don’t care if the operation fails and any consequences of that failure will be handled later on.

I have a slightly contrived example here on gist of where this could be useful https://gist.github.com/joncottonskyuk/abc6caad8be137193d4e1e58cc8d2e06

basically, in the person model, I don’t always care if the emailAddress is set, but in some cases I do, to differentiate between the two use cases, the caller can choose to use either try when they do care and want to handle the specific error, or try? if they don’t care about the failure and just want to carry on with the usual execution path.

The alternative is to just leave this as it is and the caller must then use _ = try? … to suppress the warnings. However, whilst _ = is very useful for suppressing this warning in most cases, as it shows intent for future maintainers of the code, in this case I don’t think it really adds any value. If the statement being attempted does not return itself then you are left with no choice but to assign to nothing to suppress the warning as opposed to assigning to some local reference and then just throwing that away.