[swift-evolution] [Pitch] Introducing the "Unwrap or Die" operator to the standard library

[Elviro Rocca]

> Il giorno 29 giu 2017, alle ore 03:18, Ben Cohen via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> ha scritto:
> 
> Finally, there’s a woolier justification: there’s an often-touted misconception out there that force unwraps are bad, that they were only created to accommodate legacy apps, and that force-unwrapping is always bad and you should never do it. This isn’t true – there are many good reasons to use force unwrap (though if you reaching for it constantly it’s a bad sign). Force-unwrapping is often better than just whacking in a default value or optional chaining when the presence of nil would indicate a serious failure. Introduction of the `!!` operator could help endorse/encourage the use of “thoughtful” force-unwrapping, which often comes with a comment of the reasoning why it’s safe (of why the array can’t be empty at this point, not just that it is empty). And if you’re going to write a comment, why not make that comment useful for debugging at the same time.
> 

If one could still just "!" I'm not sure that the "!!" would really encourage a more thoughtful force unwrapping. Almost every crash related to a force unwrap that I see from Swift beginners is 100% due to the fact that adding and exclamation point makes the code compile, so they add it.

Also, I strongly disagree with your statement that the idea that force-unwraps are bad is a misconception: if something is Optional, there's a reason why it is, otherwise it would not be Optional at all, and that's the reason why Optional exists in Swift and represents a substantial technological advancement over Objective-C. Using an Optional means that we are actually adding a thoughtful information to an instance: it could be there, or it could not, and that's perfectly fine. Crashing an app in production for a force-unwrap results in the poorest user experience ever, and it should never happen.

I feel compelled to link another article, where Soroush Khanlou shows that sometimes the bare semantics of an Optional (that is, something is there or not) is not enough: http://khanlou.com/2017/03/that-one-optional-property/ <http://khanlou.com/2017/03/that-one-optional-property/>

I also disagree with the idea that the "?? fatalError()" alternative suffers from cognitive dissonance, for the following reasons:

- on the right of the "??" operator there could be both an Optional or a non-Optional, which would result in a different type for the resulting instance;
- fatalError() by itself is an operation that changes the meaning of a function, making it non-total, and its very name conveys a clear meaning to a person that reads the code, thus it really doesn't seem to me that "?? fatalError()" could be misinterpreted;

Anyway, it would be interesting to consider "!! message" as an alternative to "!", thus forcing the user to at least do extra effort: that could discourage a light use of !.


Elviro
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170629/70b47989/attachment.html>