Deprecation of old Optional literal syntax

Migrate your code to remove obsolete List-like Optional literals

On August 31, 2018 the language standard changed to add new Some/None Optional literals to eventually replace the old List-like Optional literal syntax. This section describes what changed and how to migrate your code.

Changes

Before this change, the normal form of an Optional literal resembled a list with at most 1 element:

[ 1 ] : Optional Natural  -- An example present `Optional` literal

[] : Optional Natural     -- An example absent `Optional` literal

After this change, the normal form of an Optional literal is now either a Some or a None constructor:

Some 1        -- An example present `Optional` literal

None Natural  -- An example absent `Optional` literal

Additionally, the old List-like Optional literals now normalize to their equivalent Some/None constructor. So, for example:

  • [ 1 ] : Optional Natural will normalize to Some 1

  • [] : Optional Literal will normalize to None Natural.

Phases

The old Optional literal syntax will be phased out in two steps:

  • Phase 1 - Add new Some/None constructors

    • Standard version: 3.0.0

    • dhall version: 1.18.0

    • dhall-to-json/dhall-to-yaml version: 1.2.4

    The first phase is backwards compatible. The only difference is that the normal form of expressions with Optional literals changes to use the more compact Some/None constructors.

  • Phase 2 - Remove the old List-like Optional literals

    • Standard version: 9.0.0

    • dhall version: 1.25

    • dhall-to-json version: 1.4.0

    This change is strongly backwards incompatible by removing support for the old List-like syntax for Optional literals, breaking all code that still uses the old syntax.

Migration

  • Phase 1 - Automatically migrate your code

    During this phase dhall lint will automatically migrate the old List-like syntax to use Some/None instead to ease the migration process. This is a safe and behavior-preserving transformation.

  • Phase 2 - Your code breaks if you haven’t migrated

    During Phase 2 the deprecation cycle is complete and if you haven’t migrated then your code will fail to type-check since all list-like literals will be treated as Lists and not Optionals.