Does self refer to the actual data type?

Question

Just a quick question. So like in Amit's enum example where he creates an enum Day and then goes through the initializer and methods and everything. When he's using self like in the init for example is that referring to the actual data type, so in this case Day?

Answer 1 · 2015-01-15T22:48:32Z

January 15, 2015 10:48pm

Hi Peter,

Just for clarity self isn't generic to say the enum Day, this keyword refers to the instance of Day which is important to remember as most of the code we will be writing will be reusable; resulting in a lot of instances, one example of where self has no access is a class func which is similar to a standard function with the minor difference that it's contained within a static context meaning we don't need to first create an new instance of the class but we don't have access to self either.

class MyClass {
    class func sayHello(name: String) {
        println("Hello \(name)")
    }
}

MyClass.sayHello("Chris")

In the above example you can see I'm calling the sayHello method using MyClass without creating a new instance of it first, as I said above this is a static method therefore self can't be used.

Hope that helps.

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Peter Fuhrey

Peter Fuhrey

Does self refer to the actual data type?

1 Answer

Chris Shaw

Chris Shaw