I don't get why is or why we use guard

Hey Andrés Leal,

We use the "is" keyword to do type checking. Maybe you want to check if a specific object is of a certain type before you execute a bit of code.

For example:

You have a custom class called Vehicle. Your Vehicle class has two subclasses, a Car subclass and a Motorcycle subclass. You create an array of Vehicle objects that holds instances of both Car and Motorcycle. It is able to hold both of these kinds of values because they can be identified as their common parent class, Vehicle.

You iterate over the array that contains these Vehicles. For each object in the array you do a type check, if the object is of type Car you print "This is a car" or else if the object is of type Motorcycle, you print "This is a motorcycle".

As for the use of the guard statement, you use it as a safety feature to make sure a certain condition evaluates to true. You can think of it as a reverse optional bind in a way, but its capabilities extend beyond that. I say reverse because if the specified condition is not true, you enter the else statement immediately. Whereas with optional binding, if the condition is true, you enter the corresponding code block immediately after.

The other benefit of a guard statement is the early return from the scope of a function. If the condition evaluates to true, you can return inside the else block of a guard statement and stop the execution of the current scope immediately.

Hope this clears some things up

I had this same question and found this article to be really helpful:

http://ericcerney.com/swift-guard-statement/

It cleared things up for me and used an example to accompany the explanation. Good luck!