9.10 Thematic Takeaways
A goal of a type system is to support data abstraction and, in particular, the definition of abstract data types that have the properties and behavior of primitive types.
An inductive variant record data type—a union of records—is particularly useful for representing an abstract-syntax tree of a computer program.
Data types and the functions that manipulate them are natural reflections of each other—a theme reinforced in Chapter 5. As a result, programming languages support the construction (e.g., define-datatype) and decomposition (e.g., cases) of data types.
The conception and use of an abstract data type data structure are distributed among an implementation-neutral interface, an implementation containing function ...
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