On May 2, 2016, at 13:10, John McCall <rjmcc...@apple.com
<mailto:rjmcc...@apple.com>> wrote:
>> On May 2, 2016, at 6:55 AM, David Sweeris via swift-evolution
>> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>> I was just thinking that:
>> protocol Foo : reference {}
>> might be more to the point than:
>> protocol Foo : class {}
>>
>> I know that it’s currently a moot point because classes are the only*
>> reference-semantics type of type in Swift, but it’s conceivable that there
>> might some day be others.
>
> Functions/closures have reference semantics, but they can't conform to
> protocols. Anyway, that's not the important question; the important question
> is why we would add a new kind of first-class reference type to the language
> — that can implement class protocols, no less — instead of, at most, calling
> it a new kind of class.
Dunno, I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular... If there's one thing
I've learned on this mailing list, it's that the state of the art WRT to
programming languages has changed a lot since I was in school, and, at least to
me, it seems like the pace at which it’s changing is increasing as well. This
was just an off-the-cuff idea for making the language as future-proof as
possible. I don’t have an concrete examples, other than maybe “mixins”. I don’t
know anything about them, other than their name seems misspelled to me. Would
they even be a separate type of type, or would they get glued onto structs,
enums, and classes?
Anyway, I just wanted to raise the issue before Swift 3 comes out, since with
v3 we're aiming for source-compatibility going forward.
- Dave Sweeris (who is apparently trying to get the day’s quota for whacky
ideas out of the way early :-) )_______________________________________________
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