Comments on: F# Option Types

By: Reading Code: Unity at Mark Needham

Reading Code: Unity at Mark Needham — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:26:21 +0000

[...] felt as I was reading the code that in a lot of places the option type from functional programming would have come in quite useful. There is often code similar to this [...]

By: Mark Needham

Mark Needham — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:26:40 +0000

@Alex I think if it’s just single values that we care about (as in my example) then the main benefit for me is that you’re explicitly saying that the value might have a value but it might not – I guess maybe this is the same as with the nullable type in C#.

If you’re doing something like iterating over a list which has Options in it then your ability to do pattern matching is much improved since you can easily distinguish between whether you are dealing with something which has a value and something which doesn’t. It wouldn’t be so easy if you had to distinguish between null and not null from what I understand.

By: Alex O.

Alex O. — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:07:32 +0000

I am new to F# and like what I see so far.
But I’d like to voice some dissent on this issue though: while the Option type helps to avoid the exception in this case, it still requires the use of a dedicated try… function, so in the end it’s still the programmer’s responsibility to account for a possible nullable result of an operation. In other words, this safer result handling does not come “for free” from the language.
So, my question: how is it fundamentally better than, say, nullable types in C# or similar functions in .NET in general (e.g. Int32.TryParse())?

Just trying to learn, that’s all.

By: Real World Functional Programming: Book Review at Mark Needham

Real World Functional Programming: Book Review at Mark Needham — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:52:37 +0000

[...] really like the idea of option types which I first learnt about from the book. Having the ability to explicitly define when a query [...]

By: journal.stuffwithstuff.com » Blog Archive » ML-style Pattern Matching in C#

Thu, 14 May 2009 02:41:27 +0000

[...] lot there that’s absolutely brilliant, like currying and partial application, workflows, and option types (no more NullReferenceExceptions!). But one of the first things I fell in love with in the language [...]

By: Robert Pickering

Robert Pickering — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:45:52 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of using the option type instead of null for quite a while now. To me although it’s just a small change, it really does lead to cleaner, safer code. I talk some more about how it can be used in this blog post:
http://strangelights.com/blog/archive/2008/12/21/1631.aspx