Chapter 1. Exploring Swift

Apple announced Swift at WWDC 2014 as a new programming language that combines experience with the Objective-C platform and advances in dynamic and statically typed languages over the last few decades. Before Swift, most code written for iOS and OS X applications was in Objective-C, a set of object-oriented extensions to the C programming language. Swift aims to build upon patterns and frameworks of Objective-C but with a more modern runtime and automatic memory management.

This chapter will present the following topics:

• How to use the Swift REPL to evaluate Swift code
• The different types of Swift literals
• How to iterate through arrays, dictionaries, and sequences
• Functions and the different types of function arguments
• Compiling and running Swift from the command line