[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Allow use of the name "default" for enum cases and function names

[Tony Allevato]

Agreed, it sounds like default should be treated as a contextual keyword in
this case.

It never even occurred to me that "case _:" would work as a replacement for
default, but it does even today—and now that I've seen it, it makes total
sense. I could definitely get behind a proposal to remove "default" as a
keyword from the language entirely in favor of that. It blends well with
other pattern matching. The only concern I would have would be about
discoverability, but it would be easy to have the compiler emit an error
when it sees default in a switch: "default is unsupported; use case _
instead."


On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 1:45 PM E. Maloney via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> While upgrading to Swift 3, I noticed that I had a few enums with cases
> named .Default that, after being converted to lowercase, now need to be
> rendered using the ugly .`default` notation.
>
> I also noticed something similar while reading the docs for
> NotificationCenter (the NSNotificationCenter replacement, that is, not the
> NotificationCenter that governs the notification center UI); “default”
> can’t be used as a function name without escaping, so the declaration is:
>
> class func `default`()
>
> It seems to me that in the case of function names and enum cases, the
> parser should be able to unambiguously distinguish between the Swift
> keyword “default” and a user-defined name “default”, since IIRC the keyword
> “default” can only be used in parameter lists for generated headers and as
> the last item in a switch statement.
>
> (Perhaps this is also another argument in favor of using “case _:” in
> place of “default:” in a switch statement.)
>
> What do you think? Is there any reason this *wouldn’t* be feasible?
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