[swift-evolution] Pitch: Compound name `foo(:)` for nullary functions

[Jordan Rose]

I don't have a good answer for this, but I'll vote against 'foo(:)' because that's what a lot of people think the name of 'foo(_:)' should be. I'd rather be able to offer fix-its for that even when you have both 'foo()' and 'foo(_:)' defined. I'd rather go with 'foo(_)' despite the tiny ambiguity in pattern contexts.

(I'm personally in favor of killing unapplied function references altogether in favor of closures, on the grounds that they are overly terse, make type-checking more complicated, and often lead to retain cycles. Then we'd only need this for #selector, and it's perfectly unambiguous to use 'foo()' there. But I wasn't planning to fight that particular battle now, and it is rather annoying to require the 'as' in the meantime.)

Jordan


> On Feb 21, 2017, at 23:05, Jacob Bandes-Storch <jtbandes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Evolutioniers,
> 
> Compound name syntax — foo(_:), foo(bar:), foo(bar:baz:) — is used to disambiguate references to functions. (You might've used it inside a #selector expression.) But there's currently no compound name for a function with no arguments.
> 
>     func foo() {}  // no compound syntax for this one :(
>     func foo(_ bar: Int) {}  // foo(_:)
>     func foo(bar: Int) {}  // foo(bar:)
>     func foo(bar: String, baz: Double) {}  // foo(bar:baz:)
> 
> Given these four functions, only the first one has no compound name syntax. And the simple reference "let myfn = foo" is ambiguous because it could refer to any of the four. A workaround is to specify a contextual type, e.g. "let myfn = foo as () -> Void".
> 
> I filed SR-3550 <https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-3550> for this a while ago, and there was some discussion in JIRA about it. I'd like to continue exploring solutions here and then write up a formal proposal.
> 
> To kick off the discussion, I'd like to propose foo(:) for nullary functions.
> 
> Advantages:
> - the colon marks a clear similarity to the foo(bar:) form when argument labels are present.
> - cutely parallels the empty dictionary literal, [:].
> 
> Disadvantages:
> - violates intuition about one-colon-per-argument.
> - the parallel between #selector(foo(:)) and @selector(foo) is not quite as obvious as between #selector(foo(_:)) and @selector(foo:).
> 
> 
> For the sake of discussion, another option would be foo(_). This was my original choice, and I like that the number of colons matches the number of parameters. However, it's a little less obvious as a function reference. It would preclude _ from acting as an actual identifier, and might conflict with pattern-matching syntax (although it appears functions can't be compared with ~= anyway).
> 
> 
> Looking forward to everyone's bikeshed color ideas,
> Jacob

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