Re:Algebraic Data Types: Things I wish someone had explained...
by reificator on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:08PM
(#21578838)
If you take my comment in isolation, that's a reasonable read.
But it was a response to the following comment:
> > I could not believe they had not been part of any prior language I'd learned.
> Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expected to implement them yourself, for maximum efficiency.
With the context of that post, I hope you would understand that I am disagreeing with the insinuation that every programmer has used "Pascal [...] and plenty of other languages besides". You can easily learn five different languages and finally end up in Haskell without having encountered ADTs before.
But it was a response to the following comment:
> > I could not believe they had not been part of any prior language I'd learned.
> Huh? They're part of Pascal (known as variant records) and plenty of other languages besides. It's mostly C that lacks them, and even then you're just expected to implement them yourself, for maximum efficiency.
With the context of that post, I hope you would understand that I am disagreeing with the insinuation that every programmer has used "Pascal [...] and plenty of other languages besides". You can easily learn five different languages and finally end up in Haskell without having encountered ADTs before.