Functional Programming DataTypes F# .net

Functional Programming uses immutable data types. Those who are aware of the difference between String and StringBuilder in .net understand that the first is an immutable datatype but the other is mutable datatype. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, immutable objects are not allowed to be updated. The updates that you make in the String are basically not the same object but each updated creates a new object and the earlier is presented to be collected and disposed by the runtime.

For compliance with .net, F# supports .net datatypes. But it considers them as mutable datatypes. It also introduces new datatypes, which are immutable ones. So with this we know that there are two categories of datatypes in F#, one is mutable and the other is immutable datatypes.

The immutable datatypes introduced by the language include tuples, records, discriminated unions and lists. A tuple is a collection which can hold more than one values. The number of values should be known at design time. Record is a specialized tuple in which each value may be named e.g. Age = 12. The list is a regular linked list. The discriminated union is like c style unions but it is typesafe. Like C, it defines a type whose instance may hold a value of any of the specified datatypes.

Though F# is a strongly typed language which used type inference. It deduces these datatypes during compilation.