Oh, those coding styles are to be taken with a bit of salt. (+) Passing an Optional result to another method, without any semantic analysis; leaving that to the method, is quite alright. (-) Using Optional parameters causing conditional logic inside the methods is literally contra-productive. (-) Needing to pack an argument in an Optional, … Read more
Before I can describe the use cases for Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals, you should already understand what Optionals and Implicitly Unwrapped Optionals are in Swift. If you do not, I recommend you first read my article on optionals When To Use An Implicitly Unwrapped Optional There are two main reasons that one would create an Implicitly … Read more
What does it mean to “unwrap the instance”? Why is it necessary? As far as I can work out (this is very new to me, too)… The term “wrapped” implies we should think of an Optional variable as a present, wrapped in shiny paper, which might (sadly!) be empty. When “wrapped”, the value of an … Read more
Of course, people will do what they want. But we did have a clear intention when adding this feature, and it was not to be a general purpose Maybe type, as much as many people would have liked us to do so. Our intention was to provide a limited mechanism for library method return types … Read more
An optional in Swift is a type that can hold either a value or no value. Optionals are written by appending a ? to any type: var name: String? = “Bertie” Optionals (along with Generics) are one of the most difficult Swift concepts to understand. Because of how they are written and used, it’s easy … Read more
The main design goal of Optional is to provide a means for a function returning a value to indicate the absence of a return value. See this discussion. This allows the caller to continue a chain of fluent method calls. This most closely matches use case #1 in the OP’s question. Although, absence of a … Read more