[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[Dave Abrahams]

on Thu Feb 02 2017, Jonathan Hull <jhull-AT-gbis.com> wrote:

> Just out of curiosity, what are the use-cases for an infinite sequence
> (as opposed to a sequence which is bounded to the type’s representable
> values)?

1. The type may not have an inherent expressible bound (see BigInt,
   UnsafePointer, and *many* real-life Index types).

2. I keep repeating variants of this example:

  func listElements<
    S: Sequence, N: Number
  >(of s: S, numberedFrom start: N) {
    for (n, e) in zip(start..., s) {
      print("\(n). \(e)")
    }
  }

  which avoids incorrect behavior when N turns out to be a type that
  can't represent values high enough to list everything in s—**if and
  only if** `start...` is an unbounded range, rather than one that
  implicitly gets its upper bound from its type.

-- 
-Dave