Recursive records in F#

Question

A friend and I are reading up on F# and are messing around with records at the moment.

We have made the following record for representing a person:

t         


        

Answer 1

If you declare father and mother as Parent option then you can use it like:

let f = { name = "Father"; father = None; mother = None }
let m = { name = "Mother"; father = None; mother = None }
let c = { name = "Child"; father = Some(f); mother = Some(m) }

without using Parent option for father and mother you would have to create a "null parent" instance and use that instead of None.