Ellery Newcomer wrote:
Ellery Newcomer wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
Yes, Yigal said basically that. The question I have is what practical
difference does that make to the language?
Seems no different from defining the empty tuple to be void, then
renaming void to unit.
--bb
If you have unit distinct from void, you could use it for what Andrei
mentioned a while back. Something to do with determining a function will
never return because it always throws, etc.
then again, maybe not.
From my memory of Scala, the top and bottom types are called
Unit and Nothing respectively. Unit is analogous to C,C++,D,Java void
and Nothing is the type of that returned by a function that never
returns (in other words nothing). I think the latter (the Nothing type)
is what Andrei was talking about before.
FYI, a lot of articles about types systems are rather arduous to read
but I found this one written in more lay-speak by James Iry who is a
Scala advocate.
Getting to the Bottom of Nothing At All.
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/08/getting-to-bottom-of-nothing-at-all.html
Enjoy the read; all about nothing, bits about tuples. No warranty for
academic accuracy though.
-- Justin Johansson
