Dealing with optionals is unavoidable in any Swift program that interfaces with the Cocoa or CocoaTouch libraries. Realistically that is all of them with a very few limited exceptions. Handling them is often annoying a although I am very glad of the rigour that they enforce on me. In fact I like the rigour so much that I never use implicitly unwrapped optionals (variable declared with !) and I use force unwrapping only in very limited circumstances.

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