Re: [tlaplus] Performance when using tuples

I also agree on his second answer. Just to expand: in TLA+, strings are sequences of characters, so "Hello" is semantically identical to a value that could be represented as <<'H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'>> if we had a notation for characters [1]. This means that a string cannot be distinguished from a tuple. However, you can check if S \subseteq STRING or S \subseteq Seq(Int), for example.

[1] Traditionally, TLC has handled strings natively without being fully faithful to the TLA+ semantics.

On 24 Feb 2026, at 22:15, Hillel Wayne <hwayne@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I believe the answers to both questions is no. If there are performance implications for model checking, they are probably not significant, and there is no way built-in way to tell the types of values. You could sort of hack something together with `ToString`: if `SubSeq(ToString(val), 1, 2)` is "<<", then it is probably a sequence.

H

On Fri, Feb 20, 2026 at 10:04 AM Mathew Kuthur James <mathewkj2048@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

I understand that TLA+ supports non-flat tuples, so {a} and {<<a>>} and {<<<<a>>>>} are considered distinct. My question is - if all sets of the form {a,b,c...} are replaced by sets of the form {<<a>>,<<b>>,<<c>>...}, are there performance implications for model-checking?

Also, is there any way to dynamically check whether a set consists of strings or tuples, and have a different behaviour in each case?
Something like:

F(S) == G(S) if S is a set of strings, H(S) if S is a set of tuples

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