Helping The Compiler Help Us With Variants

ReasonML gives us something called a variant which is similar to what other language call enums and union types. By defining a variant, we give the compiler some information about exactly what values a variable can take on -- its allowed variants.

Here we define the kinds of roles that users in our system can have as well as a user type for representing individual users:

type userType =
  | Student
  | Teacher
  | Admin;

type user = { role: userType, id: int };

And here is how we might use it in some authorization code:

let canCreateClasses(u: user) {
  switch(u.role) {
  | Student => false
  | Teacher => true
  };
};

We've neglected to include Admin in our switch statement. The compiler will inform us of this with a warning.

this pattern-matching is not exhaustive. Here is an example of a value that is not matched: Admin

source code