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Re:Algebraic Data Types by jlouis on Thursday July 31, 2014 @10:20AM (#8114224)
A good way of getting at this is to call things at runtime "classes" or "tags" to make it apparent that their discrimination happens at runtime, not compile-time. The problem is that if you call both things types, you quickly run into a situation where you are essentially talking about different concepts entirely.

Note that most sum-types are implemented by having a runtime tag on which you can discriminate.

Re:Algebraic Data Types by seanmcdirmid on Thursday July 31, 2014 @09:30PM (#8117984)
Classes exist statically also. Tags are meaningless outside of implementation discussions.