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by teacup50 3613 days ago
> You always had to check the individual fields for the zero value.

No, you didn't. A required field has a value, period. If it defaults to a particular value, then that's the value it has.

If you had a non-required field, then you marked it 'optional', and checked for the field's existence (or mapped optional fields to a Maybe/Option monad representation, forcing the issue).