F# Enumerations
F# Enumerations are sets of value constants that can be named in different ways.
F# Enumeration is one of the special types of data, which represents a fixed type of set of named values that are stored within.
A set of enumerations can be thought of as an easy and concise way to map and manipulate sets of values with a clearly defined and limited domain by defining and working with them.
You will learn about the various ways in which F# enumerations can be utilized to improve the readability, maintainability, and type safety of your your code. By leveraging the benefits of enumerations, you can write more robust and error-free code that is easier to understand and maintain.
Define F# Enumerations
An enumeration in F# is defined using the type keyword followed by the name of the enumeration and the values it contains.
The values of an enumeration are defined using the | operator and are separated by semicolons.
An enumeration can be declared in the following manner:
type enum-name = | value1 = integer-literal1 | value2 = integer-literal2 ...
The following example illustrates how enumerations can be used to represent data:
Example:
The output of the above example will be as follows:
Saturday: Sat Sunday: Sun Monday: Mon Tuesday: Tues Wednesday: Wed Thursday: Thurs Friday: Fri
Below is another example to give a clear understanding of enumeration:
Example:
And the output will be:
My pet is a Dog. My favorite animal is an Elephant. Biggest animal is a Giraffe. My pet is a mammal.
Example Explanation
We have defined an enumeration called Animal that represents different types of animals, including Dog, Cat, Elephant, Giraffe, Lion, Tiger, and Bear. We also have two functions: printAnimal which takes an Animal value as input and returns a string representation of the animal, and isMammal which checks if an animal is a mammal or not.
We then use the Animal enumeration in our code by creating three variables: myPet which represents my pet and is set to Dog, myFavoriteAnimal which represents my favorite animal and is set to Elephant, and bigAnimal which represents the biggest animal and is set to Giraffe. We use the printAnimal function to print out the string representation of these animals.
Finally, we use the isMammal function to check if myPet is a mammal or not, and print the corresponding message. Overall, the enumeration and functions provide a concise and type-safe way to represent and work with different types of animals in our code.
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