[swift-evolution] Keyword for protocol conformance

[Xiaodi Wu]

There's been agreement even from the core team that the quality of
diagnostics when conforming to a protocol is sub-par.

The modified rule you propose has also been suggested before. The reason it
doesn't help is that (1) if a method signature is mismatched accidentally
due to a typo, you get a compilation error already because your type
doesn't conform to the protocol (it's the quality of the error message that
needs improvement); (2) otherwise, if your type fulfills all protocol
requirements but also implements an additional method unnecessary for
conformance, what is the harm that is being prevented by a compiler error?

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 17:30 Charles Srstka <cocoadev at charlessoft.com>
wrote:

> On Aug 22, 2016, at 5:19 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>
> This has been proposed before in the past by several others (myself being
> one of them).
>
> The key problem is that it cannot accommodate retroactive modeling. That
> is, you would not be able to conform existing types, the code for which you
> do not control, to a protocol of your own design. Retroactive modeling is
> an essential feature of Swift protocol-oriented programming.
>
>
> Then how about making the keyword optional? A method or property with the
> keyword before it would throw an error if it didn’t exist in one of the
> protocols your type implements. This way, if you intended a method to
> satisfy a protocol but left a typo in it, or you changed the protocol’s
> signature in a refactoring or something, you’d get notified instead of not
> finding out about it until runtime.
>
> Charles
>
>
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