Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By : Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva
Book Image

Learn Type-Driven Development

By: Yawar Amin, Kamon Ayeva

Overview of this book

Type-driven development is an approach that uses a static type system to achieve results including safety and efficiency. Types are used to express relationships and other assumptions directly in the code, and these assumptions are enforced by the compiler before the code is run. Learn Type-Driven Development covers how to use these type systems to check the logical consistency of your code. This book begins with the basic idea behind type-driven development. You’ll learn about values (or terms) and how they contrast with types. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll cover how to combine types and values inside modules and build structured types out of simpler ones. You’ll then understand how to express choices or alternatives directly in the type system using variants, polymorphic variants, and generalized algebraic data types. You’ll also get to grips with sum types, build sophisticated data types from generics, and explore functions that express change in the types of values. In the concluding chapters, you’ll cover advanced techniques for code reuse, such as parametric polymorphism and subtyping. By end of this book, you will have learned how to iterate through a type-driven process of solving coding problems using static types, together with dynamic behavior, to obtain more safety and speed.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Subtyping using polymorphic variants

As we have seen in Chapter 5, Putting Alternative Values in Types, Reason has the concept of variant types, which can be leveraged in pattern matching and exhaustivity checking. Variant types have their more complex and powerful version called polymorphic variants. They give us more flexibility than regular variants. Among other things, they are defined using a special syntax, such as type color = [`Red | `Orange | `Yellow | `Green | `Blue ];, and their constructors exist independently.

Let's see how they can be used for extending type behavior using subtyping.

Reusing constructors for different types

Since constructors exist independently, we can use the same constructor more than...