Why can you not initialize an empty Array in Swift?

Question

This code works,

let people = ["Tom","Dick","Harry"]

but this code doesn't work, for no apparent reason

let people = []

and nor does this (mutability matters not):

var people = []

The error is "Cannot convert expression's type Array to type 'ArrayLiteralConvertible'", but that makes no sense to me, and none of the other questions that show up in a search address this question.

At first I thought it had to do with type inference, but that proves not to be the issue (at least not simply that!) since although this works (with type specified)

var people:Array = [""]

this does not (with type specified as above but no String given inside the Array):

var people:Array = []

Since the last of these two has the type specified explicitly, it shouldn't need a String passed inside the Array.

Some languages (weirdly!) consider the type of the variable to refer to the type of item inside the array, so I also tried specifying String instead of Array, but got the same results. This first one works and the second doesn't:

var people:String = [""]

var people:String = []

Answer 1

The syntax you are looking for is

let people : [String] = []

or

let people = [String]()

in both case, you can substitute [String] with Array<String>

For this code

let people = []

It is impossible for compiler to figure it out the type of people. What type do you expect it have?

Note Array is not a complete type because it require the generic part. A complete type is like Array<String>

Answer 2

You can do this

let blankArray = [String]()

or ny other type you need.