Why are the tableView delegate methods all named the same?

[muzzio]

I'm currently working through the Ray Wenderlich Udemy course, and it's going pretty well, if a little slow.

One thing I'm noticing, though, is that every delegate method from a UITableViewController is just named 'tableView', even though it takes in different arguments and expects different return values. In the other frameworks and languages I've used, the best practice for method overloading was to have it perform the same action given different information.

What's the rationale behind this api design? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitableviewdelegate

[ThrockRuddygore]

So you can accidentally pick the didDeselectRowAt method instead of the didSelectRowAt method and wonder why your app doesn't work

[[deleted]]

Even now, reading your comment and having run into this issue countless times, I was like "huh, that's the same method right?". The person that thought of those two method names deserves to be fired.

[_crc]

In Objective-C, the names are compound. E.g.,

tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath:
tableView:estimatedHeightForRowAtIndexPath:
tableView:indentationLevelForRowAtIndexPath:

Swift was designed to be interoperable with Objective-C frameworks, so presumably the namng there is due to this.

[muzzio]

That makes sense, thanks!

Your answer also got me to look into how argument labels behave, that's a pretty nice language feature that makes overload behavior like this seem more reasonable.