Dynamic Lookup in F#

Many people view dynamic and statically-typed languages as two distinct groups (and this is often a reason for never-ending discussions). In this article, I'll try to show one interesting example, which demonstrates that these two groups are not in fact that distinct and that you can implement a common dynamic language feature in F#, which is undoubtedly statically-typed. The feature that I'm talking about is dynamic invoke using a symbolic representation of the member (this is something that can be done using symbols in Ruby, but I'll shortly explain what exactly I mean).

I intentionally wrote statically-typed and dynamic instead of dynamically-typed. In my understanding dynamic is a broader term while dynamically-typed and statically-typed are of course two distinct groups. On the other side dynamic refers to language features that are usually available in dynamically-typed languages, just because it is easy to support them in a nice way. This doesn't mean that having a dynamic feature in a statically-typed language would be impossible - it is just more difficult to implement it in a way that would be similarly elegant.

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