is there any further information on why Rust and other recent languages have started using `enum` to refer to sum types? I don't use Rust or TypeScript (edit: apparently TS doesn't have this, my memory is bad) or any of those languages and it's been very strange to see this redefinition occur
... and now that you mention it, I do remember the variants terminology, esp. around the polymorphic variants feature. It's been 20+ years since I used OCaml, I'm afraid...
Maybe to appeal to C and C++ developers. Rust makes its syntax superficially similar to C/C++ syntax in many other ways: pointer/reference syntax, declaration of "struct" types, generic types using <T>, curly brace block structure, and the naming conventions enforced by their lints. To be fair, many of these traits of C and C++ are also copied by other programming languages (e.g. curly braces). But they could have gone in a different direction and had pointer and record syntax more like Pascal, or made a syntax more like OCaml, Standard ML, or Haskell.
