[swift-evolution] continuations - "extensions on steroids" idea

[Zach Wolfe]

I like what this idea attempts to do, but have you thought of simply allowing extensions of types within the same module to access private members and declare stored properties? Adding a whole new construct to the language—while technically not source-breaking—would in practice change what is considered to be the idiomatic “Swifty” way of extending your own types, forcing people who care about such things to revisit their code for (imo) no good reason.

As a separate point, I’m strongly against the requirement that continuations be named and declared within the original type declaration or other continuations. As an optional categorization feature I’d be ok with it, but naming is hard, and forcing me to come up with a name every time I wish to isolate functionality of my types will push me away from doing it in the first place. Not to mention when I inevitably change one of my horrible continuation names, I will have to change it in two places (or more in the cross-platform example)!

Also on the naming point, you mention being able to refer to continuations by name. Can you give an example where that would be useful?