Variant

Variant is a sum type, i.e. a wrapper for a value which can be of different types. For instance in the following code x is a variant whose value can be an Int, a Float or a String:

import Haskus.Utils.Variant

x :: V '[Int,Float,String]

We use a type-level list of types to statically constrain the possible value types. Compared to usual sum types (e.g. Either Int Float) it allows us to have variants which can contain any number of types and to manipulate (extend/filter/etc.) the list in a type-safe way and without requiring new data types.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Basics
• 3. Safe pattern matching
• 4. Writing generic functions using variants
• 5. Converting variants
• 6. Updating variants
• 7. Do-notation

See also

• recursive sum types based on Variant are also supported and are called EADT

• VEither is a variant biased towards the first type in the list, just like Either a b is biased towards the second type (b) allowing instances such as instance Functor (Either a).