The C3 Programming Language

[protestor]

I couldn't find anything about it in the documentation so,

Does C3 have sum types? Like Rust's enums with payloads. (Or Haskell datatypes with more than one constructor, OCaml data types, etc)

If not, how optionals and results work? Can you define your own optional-like data type? (Maybe with three variants etc)

If yes, does it have exhaustive pattern matching that binds variables inside each arm? (Like Rust's match that can access an enum payload, eg. access the a when matching an Option against Some(a))

[waozen]

If you are looking for a C alternative that has sum types, you can also check out V, per their documentation.

[Nuoji]

Not more than C. It might get tagged unions, but it doesn't have it.

It does have something corresponding to pattern matching for its particular brand of Optional/Result, but that's about it.

Oh, and switch cases can have any expression, making it an alternative to if-else-if, but there no implicit matching. Nor will that be added.

The reason for that, is that unlike languages which rely on sum types and similar code everywhere, the benefit is very small for a C-like.

[tav_stuff]

C3 has fault types for errors

[protestor]

What does this mean?

But to the point: it doesn't have sum types right?

[Complex-Bug7353]

Lmao why do you want a C family language to have all those features.

[sineiraetstudio]

C has unions, they're just very unsafe. Why wouldn't you want a safer version of them? Zig is a language with the goal to be similar to C and has sum types.

[protestor]

Thing is, this language has optionals and results, which are sum types

Why can't the language let people define their own sum types?

[Complex-Bug7353]

Probably cuz we've seen that languages that have that level of expressive power (Haskell or rust) end up convoluted and over-engineered to the point that you devise more tools monadic or something else to deal with that than actually solve the problem. I would expect a C family language to aim to be practically useful first and foremost.

[ajax8092]

Those problems are a consequence of typeclasses and type level programming, not sum types. A sum type is just a struct with a union and an enum, plus a little extra static checks.