* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34540185/how-to-convert-... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32305891/index-of-a-subs... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39677330/how-does-string... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24250938/swift-pass-arra...
You can get a `utf8` or `utf16` "view" of a string, and index it like normal array (`myString.utf8[0]` gets the first utf8 character). But it's not going to work with complicated emoji, or different languages that may have representations into utf16, etc. Again, I think the vast majority of people don't care for complete correctness across all possible string representations, and possibly Swift has gone too far here — as noted by all the Stack Overflow posts and clunky API
On the array-pass-by-reference, I'd argue that it's valuable to learn those semantics and they aren't particularly complicated. They offer huge benefits relating to bugs caused by unintentionally shared state. Marking the parameter `inout` is a small price to pay, and really forces you to be explicit about your intentions
About structs and pointers, I'm familiar with them in C/C++ where the syntax is clear and consistent. It's not consistent in Swift. And arrays don't even act like regular structs, I forgot: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24450284/conflicting-def...
The top answer to your third question gives a pretty good explanation of why Swift string indices work the way they do (as well as showing nicer ways to spell a lot of the operations on them), which mostly addresses the first and third questions. It really seems that your last link is just asking for the `inout` modifier; I'm not sure why that one is especially confusing.
Obviously, there's always stuff that can be further improved, but none of these are especially onerous (once you get past the "string indices are not just integers" step, at least--for people who really just want to pretend the world uses ASCII or work with UTF8 bytes directly, string.utf8 may be an nicer interface to use).
The time I was doing a lot of string manipulation in a team Swift project, we had to write our own wrapper that basically stored strings as arrays of printable characters because the native one was too annoying. This also protected us from all the breaking changes Apple made to strings across Swift versions.
The inout one is different. It's confusing that arrays and dicts are structs, which have different rules from regular objects, and the syntax takes some getting used to:
func addItem(_ localArr: inout [Int]) {
localArr.append(4)
}As a long-time assembly and C programmer and now Swift programmer, I would say that structs _are_ regular objects, and things with reference semantics are weird. It all depends on your point of view!
Edit: Just remembered that arrays still don't act like regular structs either! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24450284/conflicting-def...
The philosophy of making code look "clean" at the cost of hiding critical information in some far away place is the biggest mistake in programming language design. If code happens to look clean it should be the result of being simple rather than being cleansed for effect.
Other bad ideas in the same vein are computed properties and function builders.
Type definitions are usually further away from the call site than variable declarations. Also, in C, accessing a member of a struct through a pointer requires the -> operator providing yet another clue as to whether you're using a pointer or a value.
In my opinion, this distinction is absolutely key. It should always be obvious at the call site. I don't think there is anything that has caused more bugs in my Swift code than getting this wrong.
Change a type from class to struct or vice versa and chances are your code still compiles when it really shouldn't because it's now completely broken.
If you can’t change a struct’s field, only the whole struct, then I believe it’s fine - and the compiler may decide to copy it or change in-place depending on its available context, is it not the case?
It's not impossible to impose some sort of discipline to mitigate these issues, but why is it a good idea to make values and references indistinguishable at the call site? I don't get it.
But it's not surprising. I don't get a lot of decisions that language designers have been making. The entire drive towards more and more syntactical abstraction in order to make everything look like a DSL is a mistake in my opinion.