[Docs] Rename Opt to Maybe in guide #1340
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I think the current name is also a common one (e.g. Disambiguating |
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I agree, it's less that I think the guide needs to adopt Haskell's terminology, and more that as a newcomer to Typed Racket (but having experience with Haskell/OCaml) the guide was confusing since I didn't know if I should use |
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I think we all agree that So let's use the name |
Oops, it's been a little while since I used Haskell instead of OCaml, I did mean that! |
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Thanks! |
When I was learning Typed Racket, I was confused by this section of the guide, which gives an example of defining a polymorphic data type. The example used is an optional type called
Opt, defined analogously toMaybein Haskell. Personally, this example was confusing to me since I then thought the the Option type provided by the standard library was defined in the same way. However, that(Option t)type is actually defined as eithertor#f, which aligns better with Racket conventions.To avoid this confusion, and since
Maybefrom Haskell is already mentioned here, I recommend changing the name ofOpttoMaybein this example. I also changed type parameter names to be upper case in this example, for consistency with the rest of the language.It also may be helpful to add a note afterward explaining that in a "real" program, for consistency the user should probably use
Optionrather than their ownMaybetype, but maybe that's unnecessary, so I left it out here.