<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></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 Apr 4, 2016, at 7:25 AM, Jim Malak via swift-users <<a href="mailto:swift-users@swift.org" class="">swift-users@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">My background going into Swift was everything but JavaScript. </span></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Have you used Ruby or Python, both of which use a “def” keyword before a definition? And come to think of it, I think <i class="">most</i> non-C-derived languages use some sort of keyword before a function definition. Just to name two language families, LISP uses “def” and Pascal uses “function” or “procedure”. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>So C (and C++ and Java and C#…) may be the oddballs here in not using a keyword, along with some functional languages.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">One thing I often wondered about (usually every time I forgot to type it) is what purpose does requiring the keyword “func” serve when defining or decaling a function in Swift. I am not a compiler expert but intuitively it would seem that the function signature could be readily recognized by the complier and people alike with the presences of the ()’s at the end.</span></div></blockquote></div><br class=""><div class="">I can’t speak for the details of Swift’s language grammar. I do know that adding not-strictly-necessary redundancies like this to a grammar is very useful for helping the parser understand the intended meaning of a syntax error, and thereby producing a meaningful error message. (This is one of the reasons C++ error messages can be notoriously unhelpful: the syntax is so complex with so many possible ambiguities, that the error message may refer to a language construct that you weren’t even intending to use.)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—Jens</div></body></html>