[rust-dev] Zero-variant tags?

[Patrick Walton]

On 1/18/12 12:54 PM, Brendan Eich wrote:
> Occasionally useful as a basis case, a kind of void variant?
>
> /be

I usually write that as

   enum foo {
     foo(@foo);
   }

Which creates a type foo that you can't actually create instances of 
(unless you use unsafe::reinterpret_cast::<foo>(0) or similar in an 
unsafe block).

But maybe "enum foo { /* unconstructible */ }" is better -- I've wanted 
void to be easier to define. Note that OCaml lets you say "type foo;;" 
for this. This is nice for interfacing with C; SpiderMonkey bindings 
have stuff like:

   enum JSRuntime {
     JSRuntime(@JSRuntime)
   }

So that I can write *JSRuntime instead of *int or whatever in C bindings.

This is of course useful for phantom types as well.

Patrick