Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
Early on, we had the This keyword, and its meaning was "this type". So if a method on class Collection was declared as This add(Element), it meant that the method returned the auto-narrowing type of this. We later changed it from This to Collection (or whatever the class name is) and added the Collection! (non-narrowing) form, because there were syntactic needs (e.g. inner and outer auto-narrowing class references) that could not be covered by This. We evaluated a few different options, and we liked (and still like) the result that we came up with. That said, I still wish we had a This keyword (see the 5th bullet point) for the "this type", but 🤷♂️.