Basic Datatypes and Operators in Reason

Instructor: [00:00] Let's get started with the language basics. We already have seen 1 + 1, and if we try 1.1 + 2.2, it will fail since there's a special operator for adding float values.

[00:13] The operators minus, multiply, divide, and module only work for integers. For float, they do as well, if the operator is followed by a dot. To compare values, we can use several relational operators, or structural equality using two equal signs.

[00:36] If you try to compare values of a different type, for example, an integer and a float, it won't work. We can convert an integer to a float using floatofint.

[00:52] In fact, Reason ships a good amount of such utility functions for converting types. All follow the same pattern with destinationtype_of_sourcetype, and the value as a parameter. For example, pool_of_string.

[01:12] There we are at our next data type, Boolean. It's pretty straight-forward, as it only can be true or false. Boolean operators are not, and, as well as or.

[01:28] Strings are also straight-forward. They are limited using double quotes. Strings can be concatenated using two plus signs, and we can also create multi-line strings.

[01:42] While we also can do one-letter strings, Reason comes with a special data type for a single letter, char, for character. We can create one by using single quotes.

[01:56] Sometimes, we want to denote a value to nothing, basically similar to undefined in JavaScript. Reason has a special value for this purpose. It is described as an opening parenthesis followed by a closing parenthesis.

[02:12] This special value has its own type unit, and it's the only element of that type. Therefore, we can't leverage it to make it type-nullable simply because the type unit is not compatible to any other type. As you can see, this isn't valid, and the compiler froze in error.

[02:34] Unit can be used in many cases. One of them would be for functions with side effects don't return anything. For example, print integer.