> On Sep 29, 2016, at 7:29 PM, Brent Royal-Gordon <br...@architechies.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Sep 29, 2016, at 3:24 PM, Russ Bishop via swift-evolution
>> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
>>
>> Why would we not have type(of:) and subtype(of:)? Why would I want the
>> Subtype<T> instead of the specific Type<T>?
>
> Let's turn this around. Suppose you write:
>
> let obj: NSObject = …
> let ty = type(of: obj)
>
> What is `ty`? Well, it's a `Type<NSObject>`, and there's only one of those:
> `NSObject.self`. So there's only one possible instance that could be assigned
> to that variable.
>
> This is true in general: If `type(of:)` returns `Type<T>`, then it can only
> have one possible return value. In other words, the return value of
> `type(of:)` would always be the *static* type of the variable, not its
> dynamic type. There may be some narrow cases where that'd be useful, but 99%
> of the time, you want `subtype(of:)` because you're trying to discover which
> of many dynamic subtypes of the static type you're actually dealing with. So
> most uses of `type(of:)` would probably be mistaken attempts to perform
> `subtype(of:)` instead.
>
>> What is the rationale for losing the meta type relationships by having
>> Type<U> not be a subtype of Type<T>?
>
> The relationships aren't lost; they're just expressed through `Subtype`, not
> `Type`.
>
> Again, turn this around. `Subtype` is the normal thing that you'll want to
> use most of the time. `Type` is the weird thing whose existence is hard to
> explain. (One version of this proposal used `Type` for `Subtype` and
> `ExactType` for `Type` in order to imply that subtype is usually what you
> want, but some of the contributors weren't happy with that.)
>
> So, `Type` is the weird thing. Why does it exist? Two reasons:
>
> 1. `Subtype<T>` only includes *inheritable* type members of `T`. `Type<T>`
> also includes *non-inheritable* members, particularly non-required
> initializers.
>
> 2. It allows precise type matches: `subty is Subtype<NSObject>` would match
> for any subtype of `NSObject`, whereas `subty is Type<NSObject>` would only
> match for `NSObject` itself.
>
> --
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
>
I understand what you’re getting at.
This topic is confusing enough that I think it warrants being extremely clear
about the naming. Type and Subtype feel like a class hierarchy and that’s not
exactly what we are doing here. If Type<T> represents the static type of T then
let’s just call it StaticType<T>. If the thing most people want to work with is
the dynamic type Subtype<T> then let’s just call it that: DynamicType<T>.
Now this becomes really clear:
class A { }
class B: A { }
//clearly only ever represents A as a type
let metatype_1 = statictype(of: A())
//clearly might dynamically be A, B, or any subclass
let metatype_2 = dynamictype(of: A())
It also becomes trivially easy to explain because the name follows the
explanation. Why can I only use required initializers on DynamicType<A>?
Because we don’t know if the initializer is available; the dynamic type may
differ at runtime. StaticType<A> knows exactly what is available on A because
it is statically known at compile time.
Russ
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