Aliases

Aliases are a powerful feature that allow the expression of arbitrary types. In their simplest form, they may be used as syntactic sugar to reduce keystrokes and cognitive overhead from typing out a full type literal.

# You can imagine typing this out is verbose/annoying.
alias IntsTo2TupleFn: function<|int, int| -> tuple<int, int>>

var swapped: IntsTo2TupleFn = lambda (a, b) -> (b, a);
print("swapped(1, 2) -> {swapped(1, 2)}"); # swapped(1, 2) -> (2, 1)

var doubled: IntsTo2TupleFn = lambda (a, b) -> (2*a, 2*b);
print("doubled(1, 2) -> {doubled(1, 2)}"); # doubled(1, 2) -> (2, 4)
type(doubled); # function<|int, int| -> tuple<int, int>>

var ddd: [IntsTo2TupleFn] = [doubled];
type(ddd); # [function<|int, int| -> tuple<int, int>>]

Aliases are Not Syntactic Sugar

To be absolutely clear, Aliases are not simply syntactic sugar as shown in the trivial example above. Without aliases there would be no way to define a recursive data type in the language. Read on to the next sections to learn about recursive alias type definitions.