Let's begin our discussion with Swift 3 changes to Collection and Sequence types. Some of the changes are subtle and others are bound to require a decent amount of refactoring to your custom implementations. Swift provides three main collection types for warehousing your values: arrays, dictionaries, and sets. Arrays allow you to store values in an ordered list. Dictionaries provide unordered key-value storage for your data. Finally, sets provide an unordered list of unique values (that is, no duplicates allowed).
Arrays, dictionaries, and sets are implemented as generic types in Swift. They each implement the new Collection protocol, which implements the Sequence protocol. Along this path from top-level type to Sequence protocol, you will find various other protocols that are also implemented in this inheritance chain. For our discussion on flatMap
and lazy flatMap
changes, I want to focus on Sequences.
Sequences...