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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Just one more thing - Swift thread
 
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FamDav
Mar 29, 2008

Kobayashi posted:

I don't write code for my day job, so I'm much less knowledgeable than most of the people in this thread. I'm trying to get my head around optionals. At a high level, I think it's trying to prevent accidentally using a declared but uninitialized variable from crashing the program. So:

code:
var s1: String   // won't compile because there's no value?
var s2 = "value"  // OK, with String inferred? 
var s3: String?  // OK and essentially means "nil" right now?
Am I on the right track?

yes. You can think of String? as a class that can either have Some String or None.

In most languages you have to do something like

code:

var butts : String? = nil

if butts.isSome() {
  butts.getValue().doAThing()
}
whereas in swift, they effectively generate this logic for you when you do

code:
butts?.doAThing();
which is p nice imo

* # ¿ Jun 3, 2014 19:15
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Just one more thing - Swift thread