<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Dec 19, 2015, at 7:12 PM, Dmitri Gribenko via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 7:06 PM, Jordan Rose via swift-evolution <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" target="_blank" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>></span> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word" class=""><div class="">-1 to using '&' in the declaration; it's a sigil that doesn't mean anything as is. (I was originally on the side of using 'inout' at the call site as well, i.e. "swap(inout x, inout y)", but it was considered too verbose.)</div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I'd actually suggest that we reconsider this. '&' at the callsite has deep associations with C semantics, and I have too frequently seen buggy code using '&x' combined with one of the C interop implicit conversions to "get a pointer" that the code stores in a variable somewhere. It is also hard to explain to people that '&x' does not do what they want in that case, "& means address-of, and it returns a pointer here, what do you mean I can't use it?"</div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>I have always thought "&" was problematic for that reason. The question is whether it's problematic enough to change.</div><br class=""><div class="">
-Dave<div class=""><br class=""></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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