[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Adding safety to arrays

[Andrew Hart]

Recently I’ve been considering the lack of safety around array indexes.
Swift is designed with safety in mind, so this example would not compile:

var myString: String? = “hello”
myString.append(“ world!”)

The string is optional, not guaranteed to exist, so the last line requires
a “!” to force-unwrap it.



    public func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection
section: Int) -> Int {
        let section = self.sections[section]

        return section.items.count
    }

In this example, we could provide a section number that goes beyond the
bounds of the self.sections array, without any warning.

My suggestion is perhaps arrays should by default return an optional when
given an index, and of course they’d support forced-unwrapping too. So you
could then do this:

    let section = self.sections[section]
    if section == nil {
        return 0
    } else {
        return section!.items.count
    }

Or you could do this:

    let section = self.sections[section]!

    return section.items.count

Of course this would be less convenient in a lot of cases, but this is the
1 place where apps seem to encounter a crash, crashing for the same reason
that’s especially avoided across most of the rest of Swift.
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