Lambda the Ultimate

Many programmers are not aware of tagged unions and I love introducing them. I talk about how records and tagged unions are two complementary and fundamental constructs, and that null is a trick that lets you still hackily get stuff done without tagged unions.

But this got me thinking, if null is the crappy version of tagged unions, what's the crappy version of records? My initial thought was "pairs", but that's not quite right because pairs are more like Either.

Any ideas? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way entirely?