Error Message: 'expected identifier in function declaration'

Question

Created May ’16

Replies 3

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I'm teaching myself to program using the book Swift for Beginners: Develop and Design. In one lesson I get the error message, "expected identifier in function declaration". The version of Xcode I'm using is more recent than the one the book was written for and I'm having some difficulty figuring out what the error is. Any help would be appreciated.

By the way, the code the book had me enter is,

extension Int {

func repeat(work: () -> ()) {

for _ in 0..<self {

work()

}

repeat {(

print("repeat this string")

)}

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Answer 1

Claude31 OP

May ’16

repeat is a reserved keyword.

Change repeat with sthing else, like myRepeat.

1

Answer 2

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

May ’16

Change repeat [to something] else, like myRepeat.

That’s good advice.

Note that Swift does let you use keywords, like

repeat

, as identifiers; you just have to enclose them in backticks. So, the following code will work:

extension Int {
    func `repeat`(work: () -> ()) {
        for _ in 0..<self {
            work()
        }
    }
}

5.`repeat` {
    print("repeat this string")
}

However, that’s a bit of a pain to use so I recommend that you go with Claude31’s suggestion (-:

Also note that Swift 3 will make most keywords much more context sensitive so, while you’ll still need the backticks on the declaration, you’ll be able to skip them in many call sites (including this one). See:

SE-0001 Allow (most) keywords as argument labels
SE-0071 Allow (most) keywords in member references

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1

Answer 3

argo313 OP

Jun ’16

This is to Claude 31 as well. Thank you both for your help. This got me past where I was stuck.

Apologies for not thanking you sooner but my computer crashed so it took some time.

Again, thank you.

0