Null Coalescing Operator for Swift

OptionalOperators.swift

//
//  OptionalOperators.swift
//
//  Created by Alexander Ney on 22/06/2014.
//  Copyright (c) 2014 Alexander Ney. All rights reserved.
//



// Null Coalescing Operator
operator infix | {associativity right}

func | (optional: Any?, defaultValue: Any) -> Any
{
    return optional ? optional! : defaultValue;
}

_Null Coalescing Operator_

The will work like this

var optionalOrDefaut = optional | default

You can also chain this operator

var x : String? = nil
var y : String? = nil
var z : String? = "This has a value"

var value = x | y | z | "default"

value will be "This has a value" or if x,y,z are all bill it will fall back to "default"

Although your implementation works great in Playground, in a real project (Xcode-DP2) the compiler wants to unwrap the optional... (bug ?)

What about this implementation :

operator infix | {associativity right}
func | <T> (optional: T?, defaultValue: T) -> T {
    return optional ? optional! : defaultValue;
}