4
Optional Types
When I first started using Swift, the concept that I had the most trouble understanding was optional types. Coming from an Objective-C, C, Java, and Python background, I was able to relate most of Swift's features to how things worked in one of the other languages that I knew, but optionals were different. When Swift was first announced, there was really nothing like optionals in the other languages that I used, so it took a lot of reading to fully understand them.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- What are optional types?
- Why do we need optional types in Swift?
- How to unwrap an optional
- What is optional binding?
- What is optional chaining?
Introducing optionals
When we declare variables in Swift, they are ...
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