Records

Sometimes you need a little bundle of values where only a single one is expected. Maybe you want a division method that returns both the dividend and the remainder. To support this and much much more, as we'll see, Magpie has records. Records are anonymous, immutable composite objects.

Two little bits of syntax are used for them: fields and commas.

x: 1, y: 2

Here, we've created a record with two fields, x and y. A piece of text followed by a colon like x: defines a field. Any sequence of fields followed by expressions separated by commas defines a record. Note that the colon is part of the actual field token. This means you can use reserved names in fields, like if:, but also means you can't have a space before the : like x :.

Accessing Fields

Once you have a record, you will likely need to pull it back apart. To do that, you'll use pattern-matching:

val point = x: 1, y: 2
val x: a, y: b = point
print(a + b) // 3

Record expressions and record patterns are duals of each other. Record expressions combine several values into a single object, and record patterns split those values back out.

Positional Fields and Tuples

You can omit the field name, in which case the name will be inferred from its position. These lines are all equivalent:

0: "peanut butter", 1: "jelly
"peanut butter", 1: "jelly
"peanut butter", "jelly"

In other words, records in Magpie subsume both named records and tuples in other languages. Records are first class values like any other object which means they can be put into variables or passed to methods:

val point = x: 2, y: 3
drawPoint(x: 2, y: 3)

In fact, any time you call a method that takes "multiple" arguments, you're actually just passing a record. Records are used pervasively through the language. Every time you see a comma in code, you're seeing a record or a record pattern. (There's one exception, lists use commas to separate elements too.)