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not comparable
Not compulsory; left to personal choice; elective. examples
plural optionals
Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course. examples
(programming, sometimes capitalized) In various programming languages, a kind of variable that is assigned a specific data type but may or may not hold an actual value. quotations examples
In functional languages, there is a data type called the option type, also called the maybe type. Its purpose is to encapsulate a value, which is returned from a function. […] In Java 8, the Optional class has been added to serve as an option type.
2015, Richard M Reese, Learning Java Functional Programming, Packt Publishing Ltd, page 147