Swift has the force-unwrap operator ! and its exception-handling variant try! for that. Sometimes you know that the exception case in the API will never arise, and the appropriate thing to do is to crash and let the programmer know that one of their assumptions is wrong. For example, you might be parsing JSON data that was generated within the program itself; normally JSON deserialization can fail for malformed JSON, but if you just constructed that JSON string within the same function and passed it directly, you know it's not gonna fail. It's pretty handy to ignore the error and turn it into an assertion in these cases, although this power should be used judiciously.