Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Swift has become the number one language used in iOS and macOS development. The Swift standard library is developed using protocol-oriented programming techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, every Swift developer should understand these powerful concepts and how to take advantage of them in their application design. This book will help you understand the differences between object-oriented programming and protocol-oriented programming. It will demonstrate how to work with protocol-oriented programming using real-world use cases. You will gain a solid knowledge of the various types that can be used in Swift and the differences between value and reference types. You will be taught how protocol-oriented programming techniques can be used to develop very flexible and easy-to-maintain code. By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of protocol-oriented programming and how to utilize it to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Issues with the object-oriented design


Two of the issues that we saw with the object-oriented design were directly related to each other, and are the result of Swift being a single-inheritance language. Remember a single-inheritance language is a language that limits a class to having not more than one super-class.

An object-oriented design with a single-inheritance language, such as Swift, can lead to bloated superclasses because we may need to include functionality that is needed by only a few of the subclasses. This leads to the second issue related to Swift being a single-inheritance language, which is the inheritance of functionality that a type does not need.

In our design, we had to include the functionality for all three terrain types because the vehicle types may be able to move or attack in any of the terrain types. Having this extra functionality may lead to errors in our code if we are not careful. It is really easy to accidently create a class like this:

class Infantry: Vehicle...