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Version: 1.4.0

Declaring

Tuples gather a given number of values in a specific order and those values, called components, can be retrieved by their index (position). Probably the most common tuple is the pair. For example, if we were storing coordinates on a two dimensional grid we might use a pair [x, y] to store the coordinates x and y. There is a specific order, so [y, x] is not equal to [x, y] in general. The number of components is part of the type of a tuple, so, for example, we cannot add an extra component to a pair and obtain a triple of the same type: [x, y] has always a different type from [x, y, z], whereas [y, x] might have the same type as [x, y].

Tuple components can be of arbitrary types. A pair is a 2-tuple. If it contains a first component of type t_1 and a second component of type t_2, its type is written [t_1, t_2]. If more components: [t1, t2, ..., t_n]. (We can think of tuple types as products of types.) Tuple types do not have to be defined before they can be used:

const friends = ["Alice", "Bob"];

but it is sometimes more informative to define a type. Type definitions are introduced with the keyword type, like value definitions are with const. Instead of a value expression as a right-hand side, we have a type expression:

type couple = [string, string];
const friends : couple = ["Alice", "Bob"];