Discriminated Unions

Discriminated unions are a powerful data structure to use when modelling a domain in an application.

The name of this data type varies between programming languages, for instance:

• F# calls it Discriminated unions
• OCaml calls it Variants
• TypeScript calls it Tagged Union Types some times, and other times discriminated unions
• Haskell calls it Algebraic data types

Pattern matching and discriminated unions are great together and makes it really easy to express complex models in the code.

Here is a simple example to make a boolish type in F#:

type Answer = Yes | No

let response answer =
    match answer with
    | Yes -> "Correct answer"
    | No -> "Wrong answer"

One popular example in OOP is to show inheritance with a Shape class. Here is an example but with discriminated unions instead:

type Shape =
    | Circle of float
    | Rectangle of float * float
    | Square of float

let calculateArea shape =
    match shape with
    | Circle(radius) -> Math.PI * radius * radius
    | Rectangle(width, height) -> width * height
    | Square(side) -> side * side

In other words:

Use discriminated unions for concise and type-safe representation of complex data structures, promoting clarity, pattern matching, and compiler-enforced correctness.

Happy hacking!