Any or AnyObject in Swift

Any and AnyObject. Not the same.

Sometimes you want to work with types that are not necessarily the standard set of literals given to us by Swift.

Photo by Jadon Kelly on Unsplash

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging

Prerequisites:

• Be able to produce a “Hello, World!” iOS application (guide HERE)
• Protocols in Swift (guide HERE) would be useful, as would knowledge of Equality (guide HERE)
• String Interpolation is used later in this article (guide HERE)

Terminology

Any: An instance of any type, including function types

AnyObject: an instance of any class type

Concrete: A type that can be instantiated

Instance: An example or single occurrence of something

Method: a group of statements that together can perform a function

NSNumber: Objective-C type for storing numbers

NSString: Objective-C type for storing Strings

Properties: fields of classes

Protocol: A blueprint on methods, properties and requirements to suit a piece of functionality