While doing software development in TwinCAT, I have always been missing some sort of generic data type/container, to have some level of conformance to generic programming. “Generic programming… what’s that?”, you may ask. I like Ralf Hinze’s description of generic programming:

A generic program is one that the programmer writes once, but which works over many different data types.

I’ve been using generics in Ada and templates in C++, and many other languages have similar concepts. Why was there no such thing available in the world of TwinCAT/IEC 61131-3? For a long time there was a link to a type “ANY” in their data types section of TwinCAT3, but the only information available on the website was that the “ANY” type was not yet available. By coincidence I revisited their web page to check it out, and now a description is available! I think the documentation has done a good job describing the possibilities with the ANY-type, but I wanted to elaborate with this a little further.