[swift-evolution] Either protocol syntax

[Rex Fenley]

My use case is RLMArray and it can't implement
RangeReplaceableCollection though
because `init` is unavailable, additionally, there's a lot of parts to the
protocol that would take some time to implement correctly if I could. They
offer a Swift type List that wraps RLMArray and does a bunch of stuff to
implement RangeReplaceableCollection, but they discourage using their Swift
library in mixed Obj-C/Swift projects and certain model objects simply
couldn't use the List type anyway because they're also used in Obj-C and
List is not @objc compliant.

So this leaves me in situations where when I need to use Array or RLMArray
I have to duplicate my code, not just in one place, but all the way down a
pipeline in order to have my generics work with either
RangeReplaceableCollection
or RLMArray.

If I could abstract the commonalities required by my application, I could
just have a RLMArrayProtocol that has RLMArray's exposed function
signatures and a new protocol Appendable = RangeReplaceableCollection
| RLMArrayProtocol
and this will type check all the way through the pipeline.

tl;dr - if a function signature required by a protocol is marked
unavailable on a class, then disjunction is necessary in order to bridge
the two (or more) types without duplicating code.

On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 1:35 PM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com>
wrote:

>
> On Feb 2, 2017, at 3:26 PM, Rex Fenley via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Hello, I believe there was some discussion about this quite awhile ago. I
> was wondering if there's any interest in including a protocol 'or' type
> that would be the intersection of two protocols. This could be really
> useful in situations where a framework that the user has no control over
> implements a portion of some often used protocol. Such as specialized
> collections from an Database framework that don't implement
> RangeReplaceableCollection but have a set of methods that are equivalent.
> The user can then implement a protocol that is the intersection of those
> set of methods and not duplicate code.
>
>
> If the specialized collection in the database framework already provides
> functionality equivalent to `RangeReplaceableCollection` what you really
> want to do is just provide the conformance you’re looking for in an
> extension:
>
> extension SpecializedDatabaseCollection: RangeReplaceableCollection {
>    // if necessary, provide forwarding wrappers where the member names
> don’t match up.
> }
>
> But in a case like this the framework itself really should provide this
> conformance out of the box.  If they didn’t, maybe there is a good reason
> so you would want to find out why it wasn’t provided.
>
> Is there something you’re hoping to do that you can’t solve by simply
> extending the framework types?
>
>
> Simplified example:
>
> protocol Animal {
>     var hasEars: Bool { get }
>     func grow()
> }
>
> protocol Plant {
>     var isGreen: Bool { get }
>     func grow()
> }
>
> protocol LivingThing = Plant | Animal // or a different syntax
>
> LivingThing's is as follows
> {
>     func grow()
> }
>
>
> --
> Rex Fenley  |  IOS DEVELOPER
>
> Remind.com <https://www.remind.com/> |  BLOG <http://blog.remind.com/>  |
>  FOLLOW US <https://twitter.com/remindhq>  |  LIKE US
> <https://www.facebook.com/remindhq>
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
>
>


-- 

Rex Fenley  |  IOS DEVELOPER

Remind.com <https://www.remind.com/> |  BLOG <http://blog.remind.com/>
 |  FOLLOW
US <https://twitter.com/remindhq>  |  LIKE US
<https://www.facebook.com/remindhq>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170202/d6913c4d/attachment.html>