[swift-evolution] Pitch: really_is and really_as operators

[Charles Srstka]

> On Aug 25, 2016, at 4:15 PM, Vladimir.S via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> > let fooIsNSString = foo is NSString           // true
> 
> I don't understand. Why is so? On which version of Swift did you try this?
> 
> IBM Swift Sandbox
> Swift Ver. 3.0 (Aug 23, 2016)
> Platform: Linux (x86_64)
> 
> import Foundation
> 
> let foo: Any = "Foo"
> let bar: Any = NSString(string: "Bar")
> 
> let fooIsString = foo is String
> print(fooIsString) // true
> 
> let fooIsNSString = foo is NSString
> print(fooIsNSString) // false! as expected

The behavior is due to the Objective-C bridge, which I don’t think exists on the Linux version. On the Mac version, fooIsNSString will be true because of the bridging magic that lets you convert between String and NSString (and other equivalent Swift and Objective-C data types) using “as”. Never mind that “foo as NSString” isn’t even fewer characters than “NSString(foo)”; somebody decided it was easier that way. And of course, “is”, “as?” and the rest of the family have to behave the same way for consistency. As a result, you can never be 100% sure what’s actually going to happen when you use “as?”, which is one of the reasons I dislike “as?”. SE-0083 attempted to remove this bridging magic from the dynamic casts and make them only truthfully report the type of the object or struct you were looking at, but it was deferred until “later in Swift 3”, and Swift 3 has progressed past the point where source-breaking changes are accepted, so that proposal is probably dead at this point.

The source incompatibility that this bridging behavior can create between Swift on the Mac and on other platforms is actually a pretty good point in favor of SE-0083 that I wish we’d thought of before everything became locked down.

Charles

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