Calling a Swift class factory method with leading dot notation?

Question

In a recent question, the poster had this interesting line of code:

self.view.backgroundColor = .whiteColor()

I was surprised to see this.

Answer 1

Looks like the rule is: if a type has a static method that returns that type, you can skip the type’s name if the return type is already determined:

struct S {
    static func staticmethod() -> S {
        return S()
    }
    static var staticproperty: S {
        return S()
    }
}

let s1: S = .staticmethod()
let s2: S = .staticproperty

I wonder if this is intentional, or a side-effect of the implementation of Enums which, given this feature, could maybe be thought of as syntactic sugar for something like this:

struct FakeEnum {
    let raw: Int
    static var FirstCase:  FakeEnum  { return FakeEnum(raw: 0) }
    static var SecondCase: FakeEnum  { return FakeEnum(raw: 1) }
}

let e: FakeEnum = .FirstCase