Unpopular opinion du jour: "variant" is a better name than "algebraic data type". Shorter, more accurate, and ADT is already taken.
Conversation
I don't think I agree, unless I'm misunderstanding?
if you say "variant", that sounds like a single thing as opposed to an option among things. each option might be a variant, but not the collective whole. on the other hand, sticking the whole under "type" feels reasonable.
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also, "variant" has a specific meaning in OCaml, though that's admittedly less widespread than ADT.
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Those are polymorphic variants though? I think it’s ok to call the non-extensible variant of variants ‘variants’.
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Ohhh, I see what you mean about the ‘single thing’. Yeah I do actually often refer to the cases of a disjoint union/inductive datatype as the ‘variants’ of the datatype.