What is the point of this init method?

Question

Seems as though this objective just wants me to create an init method with the exact same info as the default initializer swift automatically provides. I dont understand why you'd need to use "self" instead of just accepting the default.

Answer 1 · 2016-02-06T05:35:52Z

February 6, 2016 5:35am

They do this because when you start creating classes, you have to use an init method, even if you don't want to do anything special. it is also good to know the syntax for when you actually want to change something that the member wise initialiser doesn't do. In this case though, description would only make you type a string to complete the initialiser, but we change it so it displays the values:

struct RGBColor {
    let red: Double
    let green: Double
    let blue: Double
    let alpha: Double

    let description: String

    init(red: Double, green: Double, blue: Double, alpha: Double) {
        self.red = red
        self.green = green
        self.blue = blue
        self.alpha = alpha
        self.description = ("red: \(red), green: \(green), blue: \(blue), alpha: \(alpha)")
    }
}

if we used the default one, it would look like this:

struct RGBColor {
    let red: Double
    let green: Double
    let blue: Double
    let alpha: Double

    let description: String

    init(red: Double, green: Double, blue: Double, alpha: Double, description: String) {
        self.red = red
        self.green = green
        self.blue = blue
        self.alpha = alpha
        self.description = description
    }
}

and description wouldn't do what we need

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Kevin Coleman

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What is the point of this init method?

1 Answer

John Doe

John Doe