What are the advantages Swift deprecates C-style for statement?

Question

I just updated XCode to 7.3 and had a surprise about the number of warnings of my code, especially this one:

C-style for statement is deprecated and will be removed in a future version of Swift 

I saw some solutions:

for idx in 0...<10 {}

or

for idx in 10.stride(to: 0, by: -1)

Seriously, why? Would it be better using stride then the C-style for loop? What are the advantages? I am quite confused when using the for-loop now. I have to examine repeatedly to see if I am using a for-loop correctly.

Answer 1

For details, see Swift Evolution - Remove C style for-loops

To quote the reasoning:

1. Both for-in and stride provide equivalent behavior using Swift-coherent approaches without being tied to legacy terminology.
2. There is a distinct expressive disadvantage in using for-loops compared to for-in in succinctness
3. for-loop implementations do not lend themselves to use with collections and other core Swift types.
4. The for-loop encourages use of unary incrementors and decrementors, which will be soon removed from the language.
5. The semi-colon delimited declaration offers a steep learning curve from users arriving from non C-like languages
6. If the for-loop did not exist, I doubt it would be considered for inclusion in Swift 3.

In summary: there are better ways (more expressive) than a C-style for-loop to iterate in Swift.

Some examples:

for-in over a range:

for i in 0 ..< 10 {
    //iterate over 0..9
    print("Index: \(i)")
}

for i in (0 ..< 10).reverse() {
    //iterate over 9..0
    print("Index: \(i)")
}

For arrays (and other sequences) we have many options (the following is not a complete list):

let array = ["item1", "item2", "item3"]

array.forEach {
    // iterate over items
    print("Item: \($0)")
}

array.reverse().forEach {
    // iterate over items in reverse order
    print("Item: \($0)")
}

array.enumerate().forEach {
    // iterate over items with indices
   print("Item: \($1) at index \($0)")
}

array.enumerate().reverse().forEach {
    // iterate over items with indices in reverse order
    print("Item: \($1) at index \($0)")
}

for index in array.indices {
    // iterate using a list of indices
    let item = array[index]
    print("Item \(item) at index: \(index)")
}

Also note that if you are converting an array to another array, almost always you want to use array.filter or array.map or a combination of them.

For all Strideable types we can use the stride method to generate indices, for example:

for index in 10.stride(to: 30, by: 5) {
    // 10, 15, 20, 25 (not 30)
    print("Index: \(index)")
} 

for index in 10.stride(through: 30, by: 5) {
    // 10, 15, 20, 25, 30
    print("Index: \(index)")
}

With arrays we can do:

for index in 0.stride(to: array.count, by: 2) {
    // prints only every second item
    let item = array[index]
    print("Item \(item) at index: \(index)")
}