options2: unclear what to do and why

[Fxlr8]

Hello Rustlings Team,

First of all thank you for this project. It was really fun solving it so far. I got really stuck and scratching my head at this one and I decided to ask you for an improvement.

    fn simple_option() {
        let target = "rustlings";
        let optional_target = Some(target);

        // TODO: Make this an if let statement whose value is "Some" type
        word = optional_target {
            assert_eq!(word, target);
        }
    }

Looks like this excercise is trying to show how to use Option<T> type in Rust. Currently, the exercise seems somewhat forced and does not effectively demonstrate the real-world use cases of the Option type.

We start with a "rustlings" string literal and wrap it in optional_target. Then the comment asks us to Make this an if let statement whose value is "Some" type (which is a riddle by itself) providing us with some convoluted assertion. I am just learning Rust and have never seen this type before. If that task had some real-world scenario showing us why Option type is useful (for example safe parsing of data) that would really help.

[mo8it]

I agree this part of the exercise is weird. Do you have an idea how to improve it? We should still teach about the if-let statement though. You are welcome to open a PR :D

[Nahor]

One problem is that it kind of looks like valid code. Coming from C++, Rust has some "weird" expressions (e.g. let ... else ... ;"). So when I first saw that code, my first thought was "what kind of Rust specific expression is that?", instead of "something is missing".

More specifically, it looks like a "normal" assignment where the rhs is optional_target{...} and so my thoughts weres like "are we creating a sort of a struct value of type optional_target?" and "are we creating a closure-like thing?".

Maybe be something like:

/* `if let` expression = optional_target*/ {
   assert_eq!(word, target);
}