Type Aliases

Type aliases are great ways of compressing types into a more friendly form for usage in functions and other type declarations. It can be used as so:

// This will create a simple alias for a record type
alias test = {
	a:int,
	b:int,
	c:str,
}

let test2 = (val:test) {
	print(val.b)
}

Here it may not seem that useful but when dealing with many different complex records and functions it is very useful to help figure out the types for everything. The websocket library uses this to help it make itself a bit more consise

import websocket // Used for connecting to WebSockets
let websocketTest = websocket.connect({
  onOpen: (send: websocket.send) -> cmd[bool] {
    print("Open!")
    send("hi")!
    return false
  },
  onMessage: (send: websocket.send, message: str) -> cmd[bool] {
    print(message)
    send("hello")!
    return message == "hello"
  }
}, "wss://echo.websocket.org")!

In this example websocket.send is actually a type alias for str -> cmd[()]. Here it is small, but it is also useful for changing the type of many different, similar records if changes are needed, such as a user record to add another field, as it would be impractical and problematic to do it by hand.

Notes:

• When printing out the type of a value that uses an alias as its type, it will not print out the alias' name.