NotachOptional

NotachOptional is a hypothetical construct commonly discussed in programming language design discussions; it is not an established standard. It represents a value that is guaranteed to be present, serving as the opposite of an Optional or Maybe type.

Concept

NotachOptional is intended as a wrapper around a value that cannot be empty. The idea is to encode presence at the type level, avoiding runtime null or absence checks. In practice, a NotachOptional<T> stores a T and provides operations that assume a valid value. Construction typically requires a concrete, non-null value; otherwise a runtime error or compile-time check may trigger.

Usage

In pseudocode:

NotachOptional<int> n = NotachOptional(42);

int x = n.unwrap(); // safe

If converting from a possibly-null source, a fromNullable helper would enforce non-null input, otherwise error.

Relation to other types

NotachOptional contrasts with Optional<T>/Maybe<T>, which can represent absence. It is similar in spirit to non-nullable types found in languages like Kotlin or Rust, but expressed as an explicit wrapper. It emphasizes presence guarantees rather than optionality.

Origins and usage

The term appears in theoretical discussions and design notes about type safety and API ergonomics. It is not widely adopted in mainstream languages and is often used as a thought experiment to compare guarantees of presence against the flexibility of absence.

See also

Optional

Maybe

Nullable type

Non-nullable type

Type safety