Question

Is there a built-in “make pair” function or operator? I know this is trivial, but it would ease function composition in some cases.

Basically, just

let makePair a b = a, b

Can I also suggest Foogle?

Answer 1

No, I don’t think there is a function like that in the F# library (and you also cannot treat , as an operator, which is allowed in Haskell).

F# lacks many other functions that are often used in function composition (or point-free style) including flip : ('a -> 'b) -> 'b -> 'a and curry : ('a * 'b -> c) -> 'a -> 'b - 'c). Frankly, I think that this is a good thing because it discourages people from writing code that is hard to read.

Of course, there are many cases where using some function like this would give readable code, but it is really difficult to find the right ballance.