The mind boggles.
A little.
Of course, Swift wouldn't be Swift if this weren't a special case of a special case, specifically the case of multiple trailing closures, which is a special case of trailing closures, which are weird and special-casey enough by themselves. Below is an example:
UIView.animate(withDuration: 0.3) {
self.view.alpha = 0
} completion: { _ in
self.view.removeFromSuperview()
}
Note how the arguments to
animate() would seem to terminate at the closing parenthesis,
but that's actually not the case. The curly braces after the closing paren start a closure that is
actually also an argument to the method, a so-called trailing closure. I have a little bit of
sympathy for this construct, because closures inside of the parentheses look really, really
awkward. (Of course, all params apart from a sole x inside f(x)
look awkward, but let's not quibble. For now.).Another thing this enables is methods that reasonably resemble control structures, which I heard is a really great idea.
The problem is that sometimes you have more than one closure argument, and then just stacking them up behind what appears to be end of the function/method call gets really, really awkward, and you can't tell which block is which argument, because the trailing closure doesn't get a keyword.
Well, now it does. And we now have 4 different method syntaxes in one!
- Traditional C/Pascal/C++/Java function call syntax
x.f() - The already weird-ish addition of Smalltalk/Objective-C keywords inside the
f(x)syntax:f(arg:x) - Original trailing-closure syntax, which is just its own thing, for the first closure
- Smalltalk non-brackted keyword syntax for the 2nd and subsequent closures.
Swift is a crescendo of special cases stopping just short of the general; the result is complexity in the semantics, complexity in the behaviour (i.e. bugs), and complexity in use (i.e. workarounds).In understand that this proposal was quite controversial, with heated discussion between opponents and proponents. I understand and sympathize with both sides. On the one hand, this is markedly better than alternatives. On the other hand it is a special case of a special case that is difficult to justify as an addition of all that is already there.
Special cases beget special cases beget special cases.
Of course the answer was always there: Smalltalk keyword syntax is not just the only reasonable solution in this case, it also solves all the other cases. It is the general solution. Here's how this could look in Objective-Smalltalk (which uses curly braces instead for closures instead of Smalltalk-80's square brackets):
UIView animate:{ self.view.alpha ← 0. } withDuration:0.3 completion:{ self view removeFromSuperview. }.
No special cases, every argument is labeled, no syntax mush of brackets inside parentheses etc. And yes, this also handles user-defined control structures,
to:do: is just a
method on NSNumber:
1 to:10 do:{:i | stdout println:"I will not introduce {i} special cases willy nilly.".}.
And since keywords naturally go between their arguments, there is no need for "operators", as a very different and special syntax form. You just allow some "binary" keywords to look a little different, so instead of
2 multiply:3 you can write 2 * 3.
And when you have 2 raisedTo:3 instead of pow(2,3) (with the
signature: func pow(_ x: Decimal, _ y: Int) -> Decimal), do you
really neeed to go to the trouble of defining an "operator"?
Or Swift's a as b, another special kind of syntax. How about a as:b?
(Yes I know there are details, but those are ... details.). And so on and so forth.
But of course, it's too late now. When I chose Smalltalk as the base syntax for the language that has turned into Objective-Smalltalk, it wasn't just because I just like it or have gotten used to it via Objective-C. Smalltalk's syntax is surprisingly flexible and general, Smalltalk APIs look a lot like DSLs, without any of the tooling or other overheads.
And that's the frustrating part: this stuff was and is available and well-known. At least if you bother to look and/or ask. But instead, we just choose these things willy-nilly and everybody has to suffer the consequences.
UPDATE:
I guess what I am trying to get at is that if you'd thought things through just a little bit, you could have had almost the entire syntax of your language for the cost (complexity, implementation size and brittleness, cognitive load, etc.) of this one special case of a special case. And it would have been overall better to boot.
6 comments:
Of course, methods that resemble control structures have some amusingly unintuitive semantics — for instance, try using "return" inside one. Ruby actually manages to make this situation even worse by virtue of its variable scoping rules (inside a method, any assignment causes Ruby to create a new local variable by default; this also applies to "control structures" that are really using blocks, but not, of course, to actual control structures because that would be madness), so I suppose there are small mercies in that Swift hasn't done that (as far as I know, anyway). But doubtless there's enthusiasm somewhere in the Swift community for not having to declare variables, so maybe this is just another foot cannon waiting to go off?
a as b in swift is not a function call. There is no code executed - this is mainly type guidance for the compiler. Maybe thats why it didn’t use the function call syntax.
@al45tair: returning from blocks is a fun one, yes. Smalltalk has been handling control structures as methods reasonably well for ~4 decades, so I am not too worried.
@Alistra: neither are control structures, in most languages, partly for some of the reasons mentioned here, and I don't see why you can't put coercions in the same syntactic umbrella, as they sure look like one thing goes in and another comes out. At least if you have a syntax that is actually flexible enough to accommodate this kind of use, which I would agree the "function call" syntax is not.
@Alistra:
There is also been some movement to bring type-level operations into the realm of function calls, for example First Class Dynamic Types and
Reified Generics: The Search for the Cure.
When Apple introduced Swift, I played with it for a few months and then swiftly left the Apple ecosystem and became a professional Clojure developer. These concerns are quite distant in the land of a syntactically compact, elegant and modern lisp.
@Alistra: It would appear the whole story with as is a bit more complicated:
as, as?, and as!
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