Yanis Zafiropulos - Swift Cookbook

Answer: A 30-something, Spain-based - originally Greek - programmer who has been in love with the Art of Code since he was a 8-year-old kid. He usually goes by the nickname Dr.Kameleon. Ah, and - in some former life - he's been a Med student but decided this life's too short for that. Hence, the "Dr. part.

Answer: To challenge myself, whether I can share my personal experiments with Swift, the things I myself had to learn step-by-step, so that it makes a rather pleasant and useful reading for every Swift programmer; a book, the way I've always envisaged code cookbooks: simple, concise and to the point.

Answer: Yanis. IPA: /'jan-is/. Pronounced like... oh, let's leave that here, shall we?

Now, that you got your hands on this little book, let's get them a bit... dirty. And what's better than delving into our first program?

So, fire up your favorite editor and let's write this very... complicated one line of code.

Now we already have our code file, let's save this as hello.swift. The next rather logical question is: how do we actually run this thing?

Well, you might be expecting something along the lines of Open Xcode, etc, etc, but - since I'm rather old-school and prefer having total control over what goes on, why/how it is executed, and so on - what could be better than doing it straight from the command line?

So, just open the Terminal app and let's go to the location where your hello.swift resides. Now, all there's left provided that you already have Xcode installed (and the accompanying developer tools) is running our script:

That was easy, wasn't it? Pretty much like with any scripting language (see: PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, etc). But wait: is Swift a scripting language? Well, not quite...

What if we actually want to compile this code of ours and have a binary, which we can then use, without having to re-compile or having the Swift compiler around?

Let's see...

Super-easy again, nope? Just note the use of swiftc (the Swift compiler) instead of swift.

Now, if you look again into your folder contents, you'll notice a single hello binary, which you can execute, like any normal binary:

And that was it.

So, can Swift be used for Scripting, pretty much like any regular interpreted language like PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl or... even Bash?

Well, here's the catch: given its speed, it sure can; at least for smaller scripts. Plus, since Apple has already launched it as open-source software (already having been ported to Linux), this makes it a not so Mac-only thing.

So, the answer is: why not?

Let's get started then, with the same... ultra-complex Hello World we played with in the previous section.

And now let's add the magic shebang line:

We save it as hello_script.swift. And that was it.

First, we make it "officially" executable by:

We can now execute it as we would execute any script:

Yay! Now, it's time to rock'n'roll! :)