Swift Pocket Reference

236 Pages·2016·2.997 MB·English

by  Anthony Gray

SECOND EDITION
Swift Pocket Reference
Anthony Gray
Swift Pocket Reference
by Anthony Gray
Copyright © 2016 Anthony Gray. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North,
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Editor: Rachel Roumeliotis
Production Editor: Colleen Lobner
Proofreader: Christina Edwards
Indexer: WordCo Indexing Services, Inc.
Interior Designer: David Futato
Cover Designer: Randy Comer
Illustrator: Rebecca Demarest
December 2014: First Edition
November 2015: Second Edition
Revision History for the Second Edition
2015-11-11: First Release
2015-12-18: Second Release
2016-03-04: Third Release
While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that
the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the
publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions,
including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use
of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained
in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this
work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellec‐
tual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use
thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.
978-1-491-95860-5
[LSI]
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Conventions Used in This Book 2
Using Code Examples 2
Safari® Books Online 3
How to Contact Us 4
Acknowledgments 5
Getting Started with Swift 2 5
A Taste of Swift 12
Basic Language Features 14
Types 18
Variables and Constants 23
Tuples 27
Operators 30
Strings and Characters 39
Arrays 48
Dictionaries 57
Sets 62
Functions 68
Closures 75
Optionals 81
iii
Program Flow 88
Classes 106
Structures 139
Enumerations 144
Access Control 151
Extensions 155
Checking and Casting Types 158
Protocols 162
Memory Management 187
Generics 193
Operator Overloading 201
Ranges, Intervals, and Strides 206
Global Functions 210
Changes From Swift 1.0 215
Index 217
iv | Table of Contents
Swift Pocket Reference
Introduction
Swift is an exciting new language from Apple, first announced
at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
in June 2014. The language started life as the brainchild
of Chris Lattner, director of Apple’s Developer Tools depart‐
ment, and is the next step in the evolution of Apple’s software
development ecosystem.
Swift brings with it many modern language features, including
type safety, generics, type inference, closures, tuples, protocols,
automatic memory management, and support for Unicode (for
character and string values as well as for identifiers). You can
use a mixture of Swift and Objective-C in a single project, and
either language can call APIs implemented in the other.
The challenge for anyone learning or writing about Swift is that
the language is still evolving. When they introduced it, Apple
stated that the language specification was not final, and that the
syntax and feature set would change. Since the initial release,
there have been two significant updates (versions 1.2 and 2.0),
both of which introduced new features, and in some cases
changed existing features. Fortunately, Xcode can detect most
of the cases where your code is using an older syntax or feature,
and offers hints at what to change to address this.
1
Despite the uncertainty of a changing language, Swift continues
to show great promise. It follows on from the company’s other
major developer tools initiatives (all led by Lattner) including
LLVM, Clang, LLDB, ARC, and a series of extensions to
Objective-C, and it’s clear that Apple sees it as the future lan‐
guage of choice for iOS and OS X software development.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames,
and file extensions.
Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to
refer to program elements such as variable or function
names, databases, data types, environment variables, state‐
ments, and keywords.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed liter‐
ally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied val‐
ues or by values determined by context.
NOTE
This element signifies a general note.
Using Code Examples
You can download code samples that accompany this book at
https://github.com/adgray/SwiftPocketReference2ndEd.
2 | Swift Pocket Reference
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if
example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your
programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us
for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion
of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several
chunks of code from this book does not require permission.
Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly
books does require permission. Answering a question by citing
this book and quoting example code does not require permis‐
sion. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from
this book into your product’s documentation does require per‐
mission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution
usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For
example: “Swift Pocket Reference by Anthony Gray (O’Reilly).
Copyright 2016 Anthony Gray, 978-1-491-94007-5.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or
the permission given above, feel free to contact us at permis‐
[email protected].
Safari® Books Online
Safari Books Online is an on-demand
digital library that delivers expert
content in both book and video form
from the world’s leading authors in technology and busi‐
ness.
Technology professionals, software developers, web designers,
and business and creative professionals use Safari Books
Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving,
learning, and certification training.
Safari Books Online offers a range of plans and pricing for
enterprise, government, education, and individuals.
Safari® Books Online | 3
Members have access to thousands of books, training videos,
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Online, please visit us online.
How to Contact Us
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We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, exam‐
ples, and any additional information. You can access this page
at http://bit.ly/swift_pocket_ref_2e.
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4 | Swift Pocket Reference