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

[Robert Bennett]

If/when Never is made a bottom time, I suppose this discussion will be moot because it will automatically work with ?? and the compiler would have to go out of its way to prevent that.

But until then, I much prefer guard-let-else to the proposed addition to ??. With a guard-let-else, the first word on the line tells you what’s going on, and when scanning through code you can quickly skim over that entire block as soon as you see “guard”. Guard-let-else makes it easy to understand the code at a glance. With the proposed addition to ??, you have to read all the way to the end of the line to understand that you’re exiting early with a fatal error. And in addition this lacks the flexibility of guard-let-else because you *must* fail; you cannot perform cleanup work and/or return gracefully.

While a convenient syntactic sugar, I foresee this addition making quickly understanding existing code much more difficult, and without much added convenience.

> On Jun 30, 2017, at 5:05 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>>> On Jun 30, 2017, at 5:38 AM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 3. If we later change `throw` from being a statement to being a `Never`-returning expression, you could use `throw` on the right-hand side of `??`.
>> 
>> What do you have in mind here?  I don't recall any discussion of `throw` return Never.  It seems like a novel use of a bottom type that might preclude the possibility of ever having a Result type that seamlessly bridges to Swift's error handling.  
> 
> 
> `throw` is currently a statement. Imagine, for sake of illustration, that it was instead a function. This function would take an `Error` as a parameter and throw it. It would never return normally—it would only return by throwing—so its return type would be `Never`:
> 
> 	@_implicitlyTry
> 	func throw(_ error: Error) throws -> Never {
> 		try Builtin.throw(error)
> 		unreachable()
> 	}
> 
> What I'm suggesting is that `throw` should remain a keyword, but should have the semantics of this `throw(_:)` function. The parser should allow it in expression context, the `try` checker should treat it as though it was already marked `try`, and the type checker should treat it as an expression that returns `Never` but can throw.
> 
> That would then allow you to say things like:
> 
> 	let lastItem = array.last ?? throw MyError.arrayEmpty
> 
> It would not have any negative effect I can think of on `Result`. In fact, trying to directly wrap a `throw SomeError.foo` statement in a `Result` would produce a `Result<Never, SomeError>`, correctly expressing the fact that the result of that particular expression can never be successful.
> 
> -- 
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
> 
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