[swift-users] Clarification on the role of `CustomStringConvertible`

[Erica Sadun]

On Jun 29, 2016, at 2:33 PM, Daniel Dunbar via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I would like some clarification regarding the expected role of `CustomStringConvertible` for types which have a natural, lossless, string representation.

And this is why we started down the road towards clarifying that it wasn't 
convertible but a lossy representation. What you really want is a protocol that
represents an isomorphic relationship. RawRepresentable is about as close as 
you can get right now.

And "representation" in RawRepresentable actually means "isomorphic conversion
between types". (ish.)

-- E, paging Matthew Johnson to the SE-0041 courtesy phone

p.s. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0041-conversion-protocol-conventions.md


> I don't have good terminology to use here, but is the expectation that the "textual string representation" is a readable description of the object? This seems to correspond to the synthesized (?) default definition for struct types, as well as some of the uses for Foundation types without natural string representations (i.e. `Foundation.Notification` reports something like "name = foo, object = ..., userInfo = ...").
> 
> Or, is the expectation that it provide a string *representation* of the object, for objects where that makes sense. This corresponds to the use in `Foundation.UUID`, or the example of `Point.description` from the stdlib's `CustomStringConvertible` documentation.
> 
> Another way of phrasing this question is: for types which have a reversible string representation, should I expect `CustomStringConvertible.description` to give me a string I could use to reconstruct an instance _without_ knowing its type?
> 
> And another way (my actual question) is, given a `struct Path` object which contains a path string, what should `print(Path("a"))` print?
> 
> - Daniel
> 
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