Accessing a specific member in a F# tuple

In F# code I have a tuple:

let myWife=("Tijana",32)

I want to access each member of the tuple separately. For instance this what I want to achieve by I can't

Console.WriteLine("My wife is {0} and her age is {1}",myWife[0],myWife[1])

This code doesn't obviously work, by I think you can gather what I want to achieve.


You want to prevent your wife from aging by making her age immutable? :)

For a tuple that contains only two members, you can fst and snd to extract the members of the pair.

let wifeName = fst myWife;
let wifeAge = snd myWife;

For longer tuples, you'll have to unpack the tuple into other variables. For instance,

let _, age = myWife;;
let name, age = myWife;;

Another quite useful thing is that pattern matching (just like when extracting elements using "let" binding) can be used in other situations, for example when writing a function:

let writePerson1 person =
  let name, age = person
  printfn "name = %s, age = %d" name age

// instead of deconstructing the tuple using 'let', 
// we can do it in the declaration of parameters
let writePerson2 (name, age) = 
  printfn "name = %s, age = %d" name age

// in both cases, the call is the same
writePerson1 ("Joe", 20)
writePerson2 ("Joe", 20)