In the recent Swift Algorithms blog post, there is this line:
Currency types (e.g.
Result) and data structures (e.g.OrderedDictionary)
I searched online, and all I could find were about the monetary kind of currency. What does "currency type" mean here?
A currency type is a type that's meant to be commonly passed around and stored, like Array, as opposed to a type that's useful for temporary/internal purposes but which you wouldn't normally use in an external interface, like ArraySlice. Having broad agreement about the currency type you use for a particular kind of data (e.g. using Array to pass around sequential collections) generally makes the whole ecosystem better by reducing artificial barriers to passing data from one system to another, and it gives algorithm writers an obvious target to ensure they optimize for. That's where the analogy to currency comes from: agreeing on a currency type improves the flow of information in a program in some of the same ways that agreeing on a currency improves the flow of trade in an economy.