Its often very useful to have variables that can sometimes have no value.

For exa
mple, you might have a variable that stores a number to display to the user, but
you dont know what that number is yet. As weve seen already, Swift variables need
to have a value. One solution might be to use the number zero to represent no va
lue; indeed, many languages, including C, C++, Java, and Objective-C, do just thi
s. However, this creates a problem: there is no way to distinguish between the v
alue zero and no value at all. What if the value you want to show is actually ze
ro?
To deal with this issue, Swift makes a very clear distinction between no value and
all other values. No value is referred to as nil and is a different type from all
others.

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