Kotlin's/Java's implementation is just a poor man's implementation of very restricted set of real sum types. I have no idea what

> This has the benefit of giving you the ability to refer to a case as its own type.

means.

> I have no idea

I can tell.

Thankfully the OCaml textbook has this explicitly called out.

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/variants.html#combining-recor...

> The main downside is the obvious one, which is that an inline record can’t be treated as its own free-standing object. And, as you can see below, OCaml will reject code that tries to do so.

That's for embedded records. You can have the same thing as Kotlin but with better syntax.

If you don't do inline records you either

- create a separate record type, which is no less verbose than Java's approach

- use positional destructuring, which is bug prone for business logic.

Also it's funny that you think OCaml records are "with better syntax". It's a weak part of the language creating ambiguity. People work around this qurik by wrapping every record type in its own module.

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/records.html#reusing-field-na...