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Mastering Swift 5.3

You're reading from   Mastering Swift 5.3 Upgrade your knowledge and become an expert in the latest version of the Swift programming language

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Product type Paperback
Published in Nov 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781800562158
Length 418 pages
Edition 6th Edition
Languages
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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 (23) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Taking the First Steps with Swift 2. Swift Documentation and Installing Swift FREE CHAPTER 3. Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators 4. Optional Types 5. Using Swift Collections 6. Control Flow 7. Functions 8. Classes, Structures, and Protocols 9. Protocols and Protocol Extensions 10. Protocol-Oriented Design 11. Generics 12. Error Handling and Availability 13. Custom Subscripting 14. Working with Closures 15. Advanced and Custom Operators 16. Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift 17. Custom Value Types 18. Memory Management 19. Swift Formatting and Style Guide 20. Adopting Design Patterns in Swift 21. Other Books You May Enjoy
22. Index

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)\(person.lastName):\(person.profession)")
}

When we define the type of a variable, constant...

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