[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Refactor Metatypes

[Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky]

>From Brent’s explanation, it sounds to me like “Type” and “StaticType”
respectively would be more descriptive than “Subtype” and “Type” as
proposed.

Nevin


On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

> > On Sep 29, 2016, at 3:24 PM, Russ Bishop via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> >
> > Why would we not have type(of:) and subtype(of:)? Why would I want the
> Subtype<T> instead of the specific Type<T>?
>
> Let's turn this around. Suppose you write:
>
>         let obj: NSObject = …
>         let ty = type(of: obj)
>
> What is `ty`? Well, it's a `Type<NSObject>`, and there's only one of
> those: `NSObject.self`. So there's only one possible instance that could be
> assigned to that variable.
>
> This is true in general: If `type(of:)` returns `Type<T>`, then it can
> only have one possible return value. In other words, the return value of
> `type(of:)` would always be the *static* type of the variable, not its
> dynamic type. There may be some narrow cases where that'd be useful, but
> 99% of the time, you want `subtype(of:)` because you're trying to discover
> which of many dynamic subtypes of the static type you're actually dealing
> with. So most uses of `type(of:)` would probably be mistaken attempts to
> perform `subtype(of:)` instead.
>
> > What is the rationale for losing the meta type relationships by having
> Type<U> not be a subtype of Type<T>?
>
> The relationships aren't lost; they're just expressed through `Subtype`,
> not `Type`.
>
> Again, turn this around. `Subtype` is the normal thing that you'll want to
> use most of the time. `Type` is the weird thing whose existence is hard to
> explain. (One version of this proposal used `Type` for `Subtype` and
> `ExactType` for `Type` in order to imply that subtype is usually what you
> want, but some of the contributors weren't happy with that.)
>
> So, `Type` is the weird thing. Why does it exist? Two reasons:
>
> 1. `Subtype<T>` only includes *inheritable* type members of `T`. `Type<T>`
> also includes *non-inheritable* members, particularly non-required
> initializers.
>
> 2. It allows precise type matches: `subty is Subtype<NSObject>` would
> match for any subtype of `NSObject`, whereas `subty is Type<NSObject>`
> would only match for `NSObject` itself.
>
> --
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
>
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