[swift-evolution] [Proposal] Revamp the playground quicklook APIs

[Chris Lattner]

On Jan 9, 2018, at 3:19 PM, Connor Wakamo via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> Good afternoon,

Hi Connor,

Huge +1 for this proposal, I’m thrilled you’re cleaning this up.  Couple of detail questions:

>  <https://github.com/cwakamo/swift-evolution/tree/playground-quicklook-api-revamp#proposed-solution>
> Detailed design
> 
> To provide a more flexible API, we propose deprecating and ultimately removing the PlaygroundQuickLook enum and CustomPlaygroundQuickLookable protocol in favor of a simpler design. Instead, we propose introducing a protocol which just provides the ability to return an Any (or nil) that serves as a stand-in for the instance being logged:
> 

What is the use-case for a type conforming to this protocol but returning nil?  If there is a use case for that, why not have such an implementation return “self” instead?

In short, can we change playgroundRepresentation to return Any instead of Any?.  Among other things, doing so could ease the case of playground formatting Optional itself, which should presumably get a conditional conformance to this.  :-)


> /// Implementors of `CustomPlaygroundRepresentable` may return a value of one of
> /// the above types to also receive a specialized log representation.
> /// Implementors may also return any other type, and playground logging will
> /// generated structured logging for the returned value.
> public protocol CustomPlaygroundRepresentable {
On the naming bikeshed, the closest analog to this feature is CustomStringConvertible, which is used when a type wants to customize the default conversion to string.  As such, have you considered CustomPlaygroundConvertible for consistency with it?

The only prior art for the word “Representable” in the standard library is RawRepresentable, which is quite a different concept.

>   /// Returns the custom playground representation for this instance, or nil if
>   /// the default representation should be used.
>   ///
>   /// If this type has value semantics, the instance returned should be
>   /// unaffected by subsequent mutations if possible.
>   var playgroundRepresentation: Any? { get }
Again to align with CustomStringConvertible which has a ‘description’ member, it might make sense to name this member “playgroundDescription”.

Thank you again for pushing this forward, this will be much cleaner!

-Chris


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