[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Nil struct

[Jose Cheyo Jimenez]

> On Nov 8, 2016, at 1:05 PM, Anton Zhilin <antonyzhilin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 2016-11-08 23:43 GMT+03:00 Jose Cheyo Jimenez <cheyo at masters3d.com>:
> 
>> Thank for thinking of this. I am not sure on the advantage of having nil as a concrete type. 
>> 
>> Have you seen this talk?
>> 
>> https://realm.io/news/swift-summit-al-skipp-monads/
>> 
>> "The concept of “nil” does not exist in Swift (despite the existence of the keyword nil!)"
>> 
>> Does that talk change your mind about this pitch?
> 
> Not much. We can talk about Swift literals being untyped as much as we want, but still all of them, except for nil, have an internal storage type, which is also picked by default.
> 
Having nil be a concrete type would be extremely confusing to me. I believe currently nil gets stripped out during compilation and it gets replaced with their respective Optional<Type>.none
 nil is just a convenient way to work with optionals. The same goes to implicit unwrap optionals !

I guess I don't see a reason why nil should be a concrete at all.  

> For example, integer literals are Builtin.Int2048, if I’m not mistaken. But we just can’t store nil without creating an instance of a potentially complex type.
> 
> And this proposal is not about adding nil to all types. You can do this now with Any, in any case:
> 
> let optionalInt1: Any = 42
> let optionalInt2: Any = ()   // ewww
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