Hacker News Reader

Comment by quarterto | Hacker News Reader

  7. Type aliases
  Is there any other programming language that ever thought of this awesome feature??

Um. To name a few: C has typedef; Go has type; Haskell has newtype.

View on HN

As far as I can tell, that Ceylon feature is actually equivalent to `type` in Haskell, not `newtype`.

And Scala as another JVM language.

Kotlin, Ceylon's close JVM cousin, is going to eventually add them as well.

http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2012/01/the-road-ahead/

Kotlin has changed so much that you can't really rely on that 2012 road map.

One of their developers mentioned a few months ago that type aliases were still an upcoming feature[1], though I do agree with your statement in general.

[1] http://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2013/08/kotlin-m6-is-here/#...

Yes, Julia also has type aliases [1]. This is a pretty obvious feature when you have parametric types. The article feels a bit like the author has pretty limited experience with other languages besides Java prior to trying Ceylon.

[1] http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/types/#type-alias...

More importantly, Java's main rival C# has an (incomplete) version of this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa664765(v=vs.71).as...

I think that's a sarcastic stab at Java, not a real question by the author.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com