A full-fledged introspection system should provide this information, which I 
suppose could be useful for creating proxies through code generation or dynamic 
Objective-C like features, should they ever be added to the language. Would 
that be sufficient for your needs? It is not clear to me what problem you are 
trying to solve.

Hopefully I won't stir up too much trouble by saying that this kind of 
capability is very useful in Objective-C for mocking, for example.


> On Jul 2, 2017, at 7:55 PM, Daryle Walker via swift-evolution 
> <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 1, 2017, at 2:07 AM, Brent Royal-Gordon <br...@architechies.com 
>> <mailto:br...@architechies.com>> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jun 30, 2017, at 6:17 PM, Daryle Walker via swift-evolution 
>>> <swift-evolution@swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Given a type MyType, how can I get a type-alias to the type’s protocols? If 
>>> MyType conforms to Protocol1 and Protocol2, I would want something like
>>> 
>>>     typealias MyProtocol = Protocol1 & Protocol2
>>> 
>>> (and Any if MyType doesn’t conform to any protocols). Does this facility 
>>> already exist in Swift? I don’t think it does, so I proposed the hybrid 
>>> “MyType.Protocol” syntax to express the idea.
>> 
>> Leave the syntax aside. What are you planning to do with this feature? I 
>> understand that you want to have some way of saying "composition of all 
>> protocols this type conforms to"; I don't understand *why* you want it or 
>> what kind of code you would need it for.
> 
> 
> It wasn’t until I started this thread that I realized that Swift didn’t have 
> a way to get a bulk list of a type’s protocols. A little later, I came up 
> with a reason why this never came up before (or at least not often): knowing 
> this isn’t really useful.
> 
> You could use this to make MyTypeB conform to all protocols of MyTypeA. But 
> then you’re stuck. The list of protocols for a type is a closed from the 
> linker’s perspective, but open from the user’s perspective. The user couldn’t 
> write all the methods needed unless the unknown ones all have default 
> implementations. The proposal I’m coming up with has a facility to copy all 
> the members of one type to another. You can specify by exact member name, or 
> you can specify a protocol to get copies of all applicable members at once. 
> This is where an all-protocols alias can help. With manual copying, the 
> user’s cardinality of members copied is usually less than what’s available, 
> with an automatic list the cardinalities are always equal.
> 
> — 
> Daryle Walker
> Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie
> darylew AT mac DOT com 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution@swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

_______________________________________________
swift-evolution mailing list
swift-evolution@swift.org
https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

Reply via email to