5. Structures, methods, features, genericity

5.1 Structures

Structures (struct), like tuples, can be used to group together values of various types, but they offer additional functionalities for associating behaviors with them, by adding associated functions or methods, thus enabling object-based programming. Another difference is that the elements of a structure must have a name. In fact, structures can be used to define complete new data types.

The methods applicable to objects of a type determine the behavior of that type. But we can have several different types to which we wish to assign analogous behavior, defined by a method of the same name: this possibility is called polymorphism. Rust has some of the characteristics of programming with objects, but not inheritance, which means that we can't...