Swift Insights: Articles on iOS Development

Have you ever dived into an open-source project and marveled at the elegance and consistency of the codebase? 🧐 It’s no coincidence.

Such codebases follow meticulously crafted style guides that turn good code into great code. But let’s face it—many of us have also encountered the other side of the spectrum: projects that are chaotic, messy, and downright painful to navigate 🤮.

The Swift lexical structure is composed of valid tokens, which serve as the fundamental building blocks that define the framework of any Swift program. These tokens encapsulate the entirety of the Swift language, establishing the syntax and semantics that govern how code is written and interpreted.

Each token can take on various forms, including identifiers, keywords, punctuation, literals, or operators, etc…

A reserved word is a term designated by the programming language that cannot be used as an identifier. This restriction is a syntactic rule that helps prevent conflicts and ambiguities in the code.

As detailed in Swift Lexical Structure, these reserved words are integral to the language’s syntax and functionality. For convenience, all lists of reserved words provided below are arranged alphabetically, facilitating quick and easy reference.

Objective-C, developed in the early 1980s, has long been the backbone of iOS and macOS development. Its deep integration with Apple’s ecosystem made it a preferred choice for developers working on these platforms for decades. However, with the introduction of Swift in 2014, Apple provided a modern alternative that addresses many of the limitations and complexities of Objective-C.

Swift is Apple’s modern, open-source programming language, introduced at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Designed to be the successor to Objective-C, Swift is used for developing applications across all of Apple’s platforms, including iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.