<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 20, 2015, at 3:58 , Tino Heth 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 class=""><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class="">The main reason to use `associated` is because the feature is called an "associated type". If we're willing to rename the feature to "placeholder type", then `placeholder` would be a good keyword.<br class=""></blockquote>good point - maybe it's because I'm no native speaker, but for me "associated type" is just a technical term with no obvious meaning.</div></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div>Fair enough; "associated type" <i class="">is</i> a fairly vacuous term. I think the implication is that when you choose a <i class="">model</i> of the protocol, the concrete type, then these other types come along with it. But that's not immediately clear, so I don't think renaming the feature is out of the question.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I don't like the name "placeholder" or "placeholder type" because that only describes how they're used in the protocol. When you're actually implementing a generic function, the generic parameter is a sort of placeholder, and the associated types are just as concrete as the conforming type itself.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Jordan<br class=""><br class=""></div><br class=""></body></html>