Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Generic Functions and Methods

Remember the map(_:) method defined on Array from Chapter 13? map(_:) applies a closure to each element in the array and returns an array of the results. Given what you just learned about generics, you can now implement a version of this function yourself. Add the following code to your playground.

Listing 22.6  Your own map function

...
func myMap<T,U>(items: [T], f: (T) -> (U)) -> [U] {
    var result = [U]()
    for item in items {
        result.append(f(item))
    }
    return result
}

The declaration of myMap(_:f:) may look pretty ugly if you have not been exposed to generics in other languages. Instead of the concrete types you are familiar with, it just has T and U, and there are more symbol and punctuation ...