on Sat Jun 25 2016, Austin Zheng <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: >> On Jun 25, 2016, at 6:23 AM, Matthew Johnson <matt...@anandabits.com> wrote: >> >> Hi Austin, >> >> I’m sorry to say, but this proposal makes me really sad. I consider >> associated type inference one of the more elegant aspects of Swift. >> It would be very unfortunate to lose it. > > There are lots of "elegant" things that Swift could do, but has chosen > not to do for pragmatic reasons (e.g. generalized implicit > conversions, type inference that crosses statement boundaries). Given > how terrible the development experience can be right now in the worst > case, I would happily trade off some measure of convenience for better > tooling.
Well, the type checker's inference engine has *always* been kinda unreliable, and the experience is made much worse by the lack of recursive protocol requirements and the inability to express other constraints that would better guide inference, and by the “underscored protocols” such as _Indexable that are required to work around those limitations. IMO it's premature to remove this feature before the inference engine is made sane, the generics features are added, and the library is correspondingly cleaned up, because we don't really know what the user experience would be. Finally, I am very concerned that there are protocols such as Collection, with many inferrable associated types, and that conforming to these protocols could become *much* uglier. -- Dave _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list swift-evolution@swift.org https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution