[swift-evolution] Default Generic Arguments

[Trent Nadeau]

The proposal looks good to me with one possible concern. I'm leaning toward
types that use the defaults should still require the angle brackets, X<>.
This makes it clear that you're using a generic type. That leads me to
think that the examples Doug gave should be an error as the explicit types
on the `let`s should either be omitted completely or fully specified (as
X<>, X<Double>, X<Int>, etc.).

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 1:21 PM, Joe Groff via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

>
> On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:51 AM, Douglas Gregor via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 23, 2017, at 7:55 AM, Srđan Rašić via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I've opened a PR (https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/pull/591) proposing
> default generic arguments which I think would be nice addition to the
> language. They are also mentioned in "Generic manifesto".
>
> The proposal is focusing around generic types. Generic functions are not
> coved by the proposal and I don't think that we need default generic
> arguments in generic functions as all the types are always part of the
> function signature so the compiler can always infer them. One corner case
> might be if using default argument values in which case support for default
> generic arguments in functions might be useful.
>
>
> The proposal looks fairly straightforward and reasonable. One thing to
> think about is how it interacts with type inference. For example, consider
> these examples:
>
> struct X<T = Int> { }
>
> func f1() -> X<Double> { return X() }
>
> func f2() -> X<Int> { return X() }
> func f2() -> X<Double> { return X() }
>
> func f3<T>(_: T) -> X<T> { return X() }
>
> let x1: X = f1()   // okay: x1 has type X<Double>?
> let x2: X = f2()   // ambiguous?
> let x3a: X = f3(1.5)   // okay: x3a has type X<Double>?
> let x3b: X = f3(1)   // okay: x3a has type X<Int>?
>
> The type checker already has some notion of “if you can’t infer a
> particular type, fill in a default” that is used for literals. That rule
> could be used here… or we could do something else. This should be discussed
> in the proposal.
>
> Thanks for working on this!
>
>
> There's an interesting parallel to the default behavior of literals. The
> type of a number or string literal is inferred from type context, or falls
> back to a default type like Int or String if that doesn't come up with an
> answer. You could think of that of saying the 'Self' type of the protocol
> constraint has a default (and maybe that's how we'd generalize the "default
> type for a protocol" feature if we wanted to.) It makes sense to me to
> follow a similar model for generic parameter defaults; that way, there's
> one consistent rule that applies.
>
> -Joe
>
>
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>


-- 
Trent Nadeau
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