Search icon CANCEL
Arrow left icon
Explore Products
Best Sellers
New Releases
Books
Videos
Audiobooks
Learning Hub
Conferences
Free Learning
Arrow right icon
Arrow up icon
GO TO TOP
Mastering Swift 5

You're reading from   Mastering Swift 5 Deep dive into the latest edition of the Swift programming language

Arrow left icon
Product type Paperback
Published in Apr 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789139860
Length 370 pages
Edition 5th Edition
Languages
Tools
Arrow right icon
Author (1):
Arrow left icon
Jon Hoffman Jon Hoffman
Author Profile Icon Jon Hoffman
Jon Hoffman
Arrow right icon
View More author details
Toc

Table of Contents (20) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Taking the First Steps with Swift FREE CHAPTER 2. Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators 3. Optional Types 4. Using Swift Collections 5. Control Flow 6. Functions 7. Classes, Structures, and Protocols 8. Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions 9. Protocol Oriented Design 10. Generics 11. Availability and Error Handling 12. Custom Subscripting 13. Working with Closures 14. Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift 15. Custom Types 16. Memory Management 17. Swift Formatting and Style Guider 18. Adopting Design Patterns in Swift 19. Other Books You May Enjoy

Polymorphism with protocols

What we saw 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 the 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...
lock icon The rest of the chapter is locked
Register for a free Packt account to unlock a world of extra content!
A free Packt account unlocks extra newsletters, articles, discounted offers, and much more. Start advancing your knowledge today.
Unlock this book and the full library FREE for 7 days
Get unlimited access to 7000+ expert-authored eBooks and videos courses covering every tech area you can think of
Renews at ₹800/month. Cancel anytime