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Mastering Swift 3

You're reading from   Mastering Swift 3 Build incredible apps for iOS and OS X

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786466129
Length 392 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Jon Hoffman Jon Hoffman
Author Profile Icon Jon Hoffman
Jon Hoffman
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Taking the First Steps with Swift FREE CHAPTER 2. Learning About Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators 3. Using Swift Collections and the Tuple Type 4. Control Flow and Functions 5. Classes and Structures 6. Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions 7. Protocol-Oriented Design 8. Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling 9. Custom Subscripting 10. Using Optional Types 11. Working with Generics 12. Working with Closures 13. Using Mix and Match 14. Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift 15. Swift Formatting and Style Guide 16. Swifts Core Libraries 17. Adopting Design Patterns in Swift

Polymorphism with protocols


What we were seeing in the previous examples is a form of polymorphism. The word polymorphism comes from the Greek roots poly, meaning many, and morphe, meaning form. In programming languages, polymorphism is a single interface to multiple types (many forms). In the previous example, the single interface was the PersonProtocol protocol and the multiple types were any type that conforms to that protocol.

Polymorphism gives us the ability to interact with multiple types in a uniform manner. To illustrate this, we can extend our previous example where we created an array of the PersonProtocol types and looped through the array. We can then access each item in the array using the properties and methods defined in the PersonProtocol protocol, regardless of the actual type. Let's see an example of this:

for person in people { 
    print("\(person.firstName) \(person.lastName):      \(person.profession)") 
} 

If we run this example, the output will look...

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