In Swift, what is the difference between the two different usages of self?

Question

In this Swift Xcode 6.0.1 example for a table cell, .self is used as a suffix (don't remember seeing self used like that before), and a prefix self. (which of course is everywhere), trying to understand what that really means.

// Register the UITableViewCell class with the tableView

self.tableView.registerClass(UITableViewCell.self, forCellReuseIdentifier: self.cellIdentifier)

Answer 1

Your first usage of self as a prefix is a reference to the instance of the class that contains the method that is currently being invoked. In the second usage, self is referring to a type as a value, in this case UITableViewCell.self refers to the UITableViewCell type

Answer 2

self is a method that returns the receiver of the message. In this case, it returns the Class object for UITableViewCell.