Prior to Terraform 0.12 these two functions were the only way to construct
literal lists and maps (respectively) in HIL expressions. Terraform 0.12,
by switching to HCL 2, introduced first-class syntax for constructing
tuple and object values, which can then be converted into list and map
values using the tolist and tomap type conversion functions.
We marked both of these functions as deprecated in the Terraform v0.12
release and have since then mentioned in the docs that they will be
removed in a future Terraform version. The "terraform 0.12upgrade" tool
from Terraform v0.12 also included a rule to automatically rewrite uses
of these functions into equivalent new syntax.
The main motivation for removing these now is just to get this change made
prior to Terraform 1.0. as we'll be doing with various other deprecations.
However, a specific reason for these two functions in particular is that
their existence is what caused us to invent the idea of a "type expression"
as a distinct kind of expression in Terraform v0.12, and so removing them
now would allow potentially unifying type expressions with value
expressions in a future release.
We do not have any current specific plans to make that change, but one
potential motivation for doing so would be to take another attempt at a
generalized "convert" function which takes a type as one of its arguments.
Our previous attempt to implement such a function was foiled by the fact
that Terraform's expression validator doesn't have any way to know to
treat one argument of a particular function as special, and so it was
generating incorrect error messages. We won't necessarily do that, but
having these "list" and "map" functions out of the way leaves the option
open.
It's not normally necessary to make explicit type conversions in Terraform
because the language implicitly converts as necessary, but explicit
conversions are useful in a few specialized cases:
- When defining output values for a reusable module, it may be desirable
to force a "cleaner" output type than would naturally arise from a
computation, such as forcing a string containing digits into a number.
- Our 0.12upgrade mechanism will use some of these to replace use of the
undocumented, hidden type conversion functions in HIL, and force
particular type interpretations in some tricky cases.
- We've found that type conversion functions can be useful as _temporary_
workarounds for bugs in Terraform and in providers where implicit type
conversion isn't working correctly or a type constraint isn't specified
precisely enough for the automatic conversion behavior.
These all follow the same convention of being named "to" followed by a
short type name. Since we've had a long-standing convention of running all
the words together in lowercase in function names, we stick to that here
even though some of these names are quite strange, because these should
be rarely-used functions anyway.
Martin Atkins