[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Change Void meaning

[Xiaodi Wu]

Unfortunately, I think this proposal appears to be mistaken as to this key
premise: Void was never (IIUC) meant to model the absence of arguments; it
is a type with one possible value.

If I recall, a number of conversations have been raised about Void being a
typealias of (), and the definitive response has been that this falls into
the ship-has-sailed category of out-of-scope changes.

More generally, the recent spate of complaints about regressions to a
particular coding style have to do with loss of implicit tuple splatting,
the cure for which is a proper implementation of tuple splatting, not
poking holes into settled parts of the type system.


On Mon, Jun 12, 2017 at 12:15 John McCall via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

>
> On Jun 12, 2017, at 4:48 AM, Jérémie Girault via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> Hi here,
>
> As I tested swift4 in xcode9b1 I noticed a lot of regressions about tuples
> usage.
>
> After documenting myself about the changes which happened, I thought that
> they could be improved. Instead of fighting these propositions (which make
> sense), I wanted create a few proposal which would improve these recent
> changes with a few simple rules.
>
> My propositions are based on the recent decisions and in the continuation
> of SE-0110. The first one is about Void.
> Void is historically defined as the type of the empty tuple. The reason of
> this is that arguments were initially considered as tuple.
>
>
> The dominant consideration here was always return types, not parameters.
> I'm not sure there was ever much point in writing Void in a parameter list,
> but whatever reasons there were surely vanished with SE-0066.
>
> Note that 'void' in C was originally exclusively a return type.  ANSI gave
> it a new purpose it with void*, but the meaning is totally unrelated.
>
> John.
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