Book Image

Swift 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Swift 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Swift has quickly become one of the most-liked languages and developers’ de-facto choice when building applications that target iOS and macOS. In the new version, the Swift team wants to take its adoption to the next level by making it available for new platforms and audiences. This book introduces the object-oriented paradigm and its implementation in the Swift 3 programming language to help you understand how real-world objects can become part of fundamental reusable elements in the code. This book is developed with XCode 8.x and covers all the enhancements included in Swift 3.0. In addition, we teach you to run most of the examples with the Swift REPL available on macOS and Linux, and with a Web-based Swift sandbox developed by IBM capable of running on any web browser, including Windows and mobile devices. You will organize data in blueprints that generate instances. You’ll work with examples so you understand how to encapsulate and hide data by working with properties and access control. Then, you’ll get to grips with complex scenarios where you use instances that belong to more than one blueprint. You’ll discover the power of contract programming and parametric polymorphism. You’ll combine generic code with inheritance and multiple inheritance. Later, you’ll see how to combine functional programming with object-oriented programming and find out how to refactor your existing code for easy maintenance.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Swift 3 ObjectOriented Programming - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Understanding parametric polymorphism and generic code


Let's imagine we want to organize a party for specific animals. We don't want to mix cats with dogs because the party would end up with the dogs chasing cats. We want a party, and we don't want intruders. However, at the same time, we want to take advantage of the procedures we create to organize the party and replicate them with frogs in another party; it would be a party of frogs. We want to reuse the procedures for either dogs or frogs. However, in future, we will probably want to use them with other animals, such as parrots, lions, tigers, and horses.

In the previous chapter, you learned how to work with protocols. We can declare a protocol to specify the requirements for an animal and then take advantage of Swift features to write a generic code that works with any class that implements the protocol. Parametric polymorphism allows us to write generic and reusable code that can work with values without depending on the type, while...