iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

Chapter 4. Object Types

In the preceding chapter, I discussed some built-in object types. But I have not yet explained object types themselves. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, Swift object types come in three flavors: enum, struct, and class. What are the differences between them? And how would you create your own object type? That’s what this chapter is about.

I’ll describe object types in general, and then each of the three flavors. Then I’ll explain three Swift ways of giving an object type greater flexibility: protocols, generics, and extensions. Finally, the survey of Swift’s built-in types will conclude with three umbrella types and three collection types.

Object Type Declarations and Features

Object types are declared with the flavor of the object type (enum, struct, or class), the name of the object type (which should start with a capital letter), and curly braces:

class Manny {
}
struct Moe {
}
enum Jack {
}

The visibility (scope), and hence the usability, of an object type by other code depends upon where its declaration appears:

• Object types declared at the top level of a file will, by default, be visible to all files in the same module. This is the usual place for object type declarations.

• Sometimes it’s useful to declare a type inside the declaration of another type, thus giving it a namespace. This is called a nested type.

• An object type declared within the body of a function will exist only inside the scope of the curly braces that surround it; such declarations ...