Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Dr. Fatih Nayebi
Book Image

Swift Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Dr. Fatih Nayebi

Overview of this book

Swift is a multi-paradigm programming language enabling you to tackle different problems in various ways. Understanding each paradigm and knowing when and how to utilize and combine them can lead to a better code base. Functional programming (FP) is an important paradigm that empowers us with declarative development and makes applications more suitable for testing, as well as performant and elegant. This book aims to simplify the FP paradigms, making them easily understandable and usable, by showing you how to solve many of your day-to-day development problems using Swift FP. It starts with the basics of FP, and you will go through all the core concepts of Swift and the building blocks of FP. You will also go through important aspects, such as function composition and currying, custom operator definition, monads, functors, applicative functors,memoization, lenses, algebraic data types, type erasure, functional data structures, functional reactive programming (FRP), and protocol-oriented programming(POP). You will then learn to combine those techniques to develop a fully functional iOS application from scratch
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Chapter 3. Types and Type Casting

In the previous chapter, we talked about functions and closures and covered topics such as function types. We know that functions are first-class citizens in Swift and they can be stored and passed around like any type. It is the time to look into types in detail.

This chapter starts with explaining types, touching on the concept of types in the category theory very briefly. Then it explains value and reference types and compares them in detail. Finally, it talks about equality, identity, and type casting.

This chapter will cover the following topics with coding examples:

  • Types
  • Different categories of types
  • Value versus reference types
    • Value and reference type constants
    • Mixing value and reference types
    • Copying
    • Value type characteristics
  • Equality, identity, and comparing
  • Type checking and casting