Transitioning to Swift

Chapter    6

Creating Functions

Swift functions are actually a type of closure, and Swift’s implementation of closures is both flexible and powerful—ranging from anonymous inline closures similar to Objective-C blocks, to complex functions extending far beyond the capabilities of an Objective-C method.

Swift functions are named closures that operate similarly to Objective-C methods. Closures can also be unnamed (aka, anonymous), in which case they are referred to as closure expressions. Closure expressions resemble Objective-C blocks that were introduced with iOS 4 and Mac OS X 10.6 in 2010—reportedly and coincidentally right around the time development of Swift began.

This chapter will compare Objective-C methods and blocks to Swift’s functions ...