Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, Mastering Swift has proven itself among developers as a popular choice for an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. This sixth edition comes with the latest features, an overall revision to align with Swift 5.3, and two new chapters on building swift from source and advanced operators. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this in-depth guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the language. As you progress, you will gain practical insights into some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. The book will also show you how to use and apply them in your own projects. In later chapters, you will understand how to use the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code in Swift. Finally, you will learn how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types, along with understanding how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles. By the end of this Swift book, you will have mastered the Swift 5.3 language and developed the skills you need to effectively use its features to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
21
Other Books You May Enjoy
22
Index

Custom operators

Custom operators enable us to declare and implement our own operators outside of the standard operators provided by the Swift language. New operators must be declared globally using the operator keyword. They must also be defined with the infix, prefix, or postfix keywords. Once an operator is defined globally, we are then able to add it to our types using the operator methods as shown in the previous section. Let's take a look at this by adding two new operators: , which we will use to multiply two points together, and ••, which will be used to square a value. We will add these operators to the MyPoint type that we created in the last section.

The symbol can be typed by holding down the option key and pressing the number 8 on a computer running macOS.

The first thing we need to do is to declare the operators globally. This can be done with the following code:

infix operatorprefix operator •...