It’s possible to use function composition and modify the type of value returned.  Consider the following equation: 1/4x2 I might encode the function to calculate this like so: let square x = x * x let recip x = 1.0/x  //If this is an int division it will always round to 0 if x is […]

A few of us from Quicken had attended LambdaJam in Chicago.  By the way, it was a great conference–big kudos to Alex Miller. Anyway, at that conference we met Mathias Brandewinder, a Microsoft F# MVP from San Francisco.  Some of the guys started talking to Mathias about visiting us here in Motown to spread the […]

Even though tuples, records and discriminated unions are reference types, they all have the built-in equality properties you would expect in a value type.  For example: > let a = (1,’a');; val a : int * char = (1, ‘a’) > let b = (1,’a');; val b : int * char = (1, ‘a’) > a […]

Were I sponsoring a technology conference, I’d much rather get my logo on a coffee mug than just about anything else from the conference.  Why do I say this?  Consider some other alternatives: a t-shirt, a thumb drive, a pen.   No matter how slovenly a developer, he or she will only wear a t-shirt […]

The F# developer can use pattern matching syntax pretty much anywhere in F#.  For example, consider the following list: let l = [1..25] If I want to get the last element of the list, I can do this with a little trivial pattern match:  let lastElem::_ = l |> List.rev;; stdin(7,5): warning FS0025: Incomplete pattern […]