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Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming

You're reading from   Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming Bring predictability, performance, and productivity to your Swift applications

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788470032
Length 210 pages
Edition 3rd 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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Toc

Table of Contents (9) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Starting with the Protocol FREE CHAPTER 2. Our Type Choices 3. Extensions 4. Generics 5. Object-Oriented Programming 6. Protocol-Oriented Programming 7. Adopting Design Patterns in Swift 8. Case Studies

Defining an extension

An extension is defined by using the extension keyword followed by the name of the type you are extending. We then put the functionality that we are adding to the type between curly brackets. The following example shows how to define an extension:

extension String { 
  // Add functionality here 
} 

The previous example would add an extension to the String type from the Swift standard library. Since we can extend any type, we can use extensions to add functionality to types from the Swift standard library, types from frameworks, or our own custom types. While we can use extensions to add functionality to our own custom types, it is usually better to add the functionality directly to the type itself. The reason for this is that our code is easier to maintain if all the functionality (code) for our custom types is located together.

If we are adding functionality...

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