Programming with Types

Chapter 9. Generic data structures

This chapter covers

• Separating independent concerns
• Using generic data structures for data layout
• Traversing any data structure
• Setting up a data processing pipeline

We’ll start our discussion of generic types by covering a common case in which they should be used: making independent, reusable components. We’ll look at a couple of scenarios in which we would benefit from an identity function (a function that simply returns its argument) and see a generic implementation of such a function. We’ll also review the Optional<T> type we built in chapter 3 as another simple but powerful generic type.

Next, we’ll talk about data structures. Data structures give shape to our data without having to be aware of what ...