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You're reading from  Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2016
Reading LevelIntermediate
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ISBN-139781785885693
Edition1st Edition
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Gaston C. Hillar
Gaston C. Hillar
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Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
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Understanding parametric polymorphism and generic code


Let's imagine we want to organize a party of specific animals. We don't want to mix cats with dogs because the party would end up with the dogs chasing cats. We want a party, and we don't want intruders. However, at the same time, we want to take advantage of the procedures we create to organize the party and replicate them with frogs in another party; it would be a party of frogs. We want to reuse the procedures for either dogs or frogs. However, in future, we will probably want to use them with other animals, such as parrots, lions, tigers, and horses.

In the previous chapter, we learned to work with protocols. We can declare a protocol to specify the requirements for an animal and then take advantage of Swift features to write generic code that works with any class that implements the protocol. Parametric polymorphism allows us to write generic and reusable code that can work with values without depending on the type while keeping...

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Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2
Published in: Jan 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781785885693

Author (1)

author image
Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
Read more about Gaston C. Hillar