When should you omit a parameter label?
If we use an underscore for a function parameter’s external label, Swift lets us use no name for that parameter at all. This is very common practice in some parts of Swiftly development, particularly when building apps that don’t use SwiftUI, but there are many other times when you’ll also want to use this.
The main reason for skipping a parameter name is when your function name is a verb and the first parameter is a noun the verb is acting on. For example:
- Greeting a person would be
greet(taylor)rather thangreet(person: taylor) - Buying a product would be
buy(toothbrush)rather thanbuy(item: toothbrush) - Finding a customer would be
find(customer)rather thanfind(user: customer)
This is particularly important when the parameter label is likely to be the same as the name of whatever you’re passing in:
- Singing a song would be
sing(song)rather thansing(song: song) - Enabling an alarm would be
enable(alarm)rather thanenable(alarm: alarm) - Reading a book would be
read(book)rather thanread(book: book)
Before SwiftUI came along, apps were build using Apple’s UIKit, AppKit, and WatchKit frameworks, which were designed using an older language called Objective-C. In that language, the first parameter to a function was always left unnamed, and so when you use those frameworks in Swift you’ll see lots of functions that have underscores for their first parameter label to preserve interoperability with Objective-C.
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