However, the appearance of ! at the end of a property or variable declaration's type no longer indicates that the declaration has IUO type; rather, it indicates that (1) the declaration has optional type, and (2) the declaration has an attribute indicating that its value may be implicitly forced. ...
If the expression can be explicitly type checked with a strong optional type, it will be. However, the type checker will fall back to forcing the optional if necessary. The effect of this behavior is that the result of any expression that refers to a value declared as T! will either have type T or type T?. For example, in the following code:
let x: Int! = 5
let y = x
let z = x + 0
… x is declared as an IUO, but because the initializer for y type checks correctly as an optional, y will be bound as type Int?. However, the initializer for z does not type check with x declared as an optional (there's no overload of + that takes an optional), so the compiler forces the optional and type checks the initializer as Int.