-1 

I personally think Optional has received too much special treatment in the 
language already. I’ve known folks who have written Swift professionally for 
almost a year until they realize Optional is just an enum. More magic syntax 
around it would only make this worse.


> On Jan 25, 2017, at 10:35 AM, Jacob Bandes-Storch via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Agreed, IMO it would be quite dangerous for "a ??= b" to mean anything other 
> than "a = a ?? b".
> 
> On another note, I don't see the value of "a? = b". I had never realized 
> before that this works. Is this feature actually used in the wild? Should we 
> consider removing it? (I could perhaps see some value if the assignment 
> operator were overloadable, but it's not.)
> 
> Jacob
> 
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 10:28 AM, John McCall <rjmcc...@apple.com 
> <mailto:rjmcc...@apple.com>> wrote:
>> On Jan 25, 2017, at 12:47 PM, Jacob Bandes-Storch via swift-evolution 
>> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>> Really? My observation from a quick test is that "a? = b" assigns b to a if 
>> a already has a value, or does nothing if it's nil. This is sort of the 
>> opposite of what's being proposed, which is that "a ?= b" should assign to a 
>> only if it does NOT have a value.
> 
> Right.  On the other hand, this does seem like a poor spelling for the 
> operator, given the ease of confusion.
> 
> Also, I'm finding it hard to imagine a use for this where the equivalent ?? 
> invocation wouldn't be *much* clearer.  It just feels like you must be doing 
> something backwards — "I've filled in a default value for this variable, now 
> overwrite it if this other value exists".  Wouldn't the reverse generally be 
> better?
> 
> John.
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 9:33 AM Joe Groff via swift-evolution 
>> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> > On Jan 25, 2017, at 8:40 AM, Nichi Shin via swift-evolution 
>> > <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>> >
>> > I’d like to propose a new operator for optional assignment in Swift.
>> >
>> > The idea is that by using this operator (e.g. by doing a ?= b), the 
>> > optional on the right would be assigned to the variable on the left only 
>> > when it has something to assign (i.e. when it's not nil).
>> 
>> `a? = b` already does this. Maybe we need a fixit to make that more 
>> apparent, though.
>> 
>> -Joe
>> 
>> >
>> > The implementation could be something as follows:
>> >
>> > /// Optional Assignment Operator
>> > infix operator ?=: AssignmentPrecedence
>> >
>> > func ?=<T>(left: inout T, right: T?) {
>> >     if right != nil {
>> >         left = right!
>> >     }
>> > }
>> >
>> > func ?=<T>(left: inout T?, right: T?) {
>> >     if right != nil {
>> >         left = right
>> >     }
>> > }
>> >
>> > I hope you will consider adding this on a future release of this great 
>> > programming language.
>> >
>> > Kind regards,
>> > N. S.
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>
>> > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution 
>> > <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
>> 
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