It does, but the developer decides. Also, errors are often propagated and only matched in exceptional cases, so I don't think the impact would be big. > That "

It does, but the developer decides. Also, errors are often propagated and only matched in exceptional cases, so I don't think the impact would be big. > That "way to tell them apart" is a tag, which would make it a tagged union/enum, not an untagged union. No. The difference is that a tagged union (sum type) is defined in advance but generally a union is not necessarily tagged but _can_ be tagged. Example: say you have tagged union with 3 different types / tags A, B and C. You can now define an adhoc/untagged union that is A | C. That means, we can guarantee at compile time, that we will be able to tell A and C apart later. But it is still not the same, because the combination of A and C was decided adhoc and was not predefined by the developer anywhere necessarily - which is what makes it different from A, B, C which where specifically defined by the developer.