[swift-evolution] renaming CustomStringConvertible

[Dmitri Gribenko]

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 12:16 PM, Eric Habberstad via swift-evolution
<swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> To the Swift community,
>
> May I put forth a couple of new names for the following protocol:
>
>
> - CustomStringConvertible  —   rename as ‘Descriptive’ or as ‘Revealable’
>
>
> Two goals for Swift is clarity and joy in use of the language, so I strongly
> feel that ‘Custom-‘ not be part of any new name here since it contributes
> little except verbosity

Hi Eric,

This protocol was called Printable before, but it caused a lot of
confusion for developers, and was guiding the developers toward
writing incorrect APIs.  We have seen a lot of developers writing code
like this:

func printAll(_ values: [Printable]) {
  for v in values { print(v) }
}

This code is unnecessarily restrictive since in Swift everything can
be converted into a String.

func printAll(_ values: [Any]) {
  for v in values { print(v) }
}

The same goes for retrieving debug descriptions and mirrors.  Any
value can do that.  It is just that some values can opt into
customizing this behavior.

Thus, we renamed the protocols, adding the Custom~ prefix.  Our
intention was to encourage only conformances to these protocols, and
discourage writing APIs against them.

Dmitri

-- 
main(i,j){for(i=2;;i++){for(j=2;j<i;j++){if(!(i%j)){j=0;break;}}if
(j){printf("%d\n",i);}}} /*Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com>*/