Hello Swift community,
The review of SE-0537: Section placement control for functions ran from July 14...27, 2026.
Feedback was light but productive, centering mostly on the rules which make a nested closure or function infer an @section attribute from its context. The Language Steering Group believes that it would be surprising to developers if, for instance, the closure passed to a with* function required a separate @section attribute, and that requiring explicit attributes in such cases would be burdensome and clutter code. However, we agree with the review feedback that there needs to be a convenient way to disable this inference, and we therefore have asked the author to add an @section(default) syntax to indicate that a function should be placed in the default text section.
We also discussed the future direction where the @section attribute could have separate data: and function: section names. We believe that this may be a good direction to pursue to allow more contextual inference of sections, but feel that the current scope of SE-0537 is a useful incremental step towards that.
Since the @section(default) spelling was discussed during the review and was not controversial, the Language Steering Group has therefore chosen to accept with modification rather than extend the review. The proposal has been updated to reflect this change.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the review. Your feedback made a material impact on the design of this feature.
Becca Royal-Gordon
SE-0537 Review Manager