Jon Fairbairn
Is there a convenient way of handling a data structure with lots of fields of different types that may or may not be filled in?
Hi Jon, if your question had appeared in a database forum, the answer would be ... Sounds like you need to do normal-form analysis: - what are the functional dependencies between the fields? - is your data structure something like a 'universal relation'? - is the structure better expressed as several records? (vertically partitioned) Relevant treatments could be "How to Handle missing information without using NULL" http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/Missing-info-without-nulls.pdf I appreciate that SQL's NULL is not the same as Haskell's Maybe/Nothing (and SQL's semantics for NULL are utterly horrible). Nevertheless, if you're concerned to avoid the wasted space of sparse records, it could be a helpful discipline to design data structures without needing Maybe's. AntC