optional

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From option + -al.

not comparable Not compulsory; left to personal choice; elective. On that beach clothing is entirely optional.

Something that is not compulsory, especially part of an academic course.
capitalized, sometimes In various programming languages, a kind of variable that is assigned a specific data type but may or may not hold an actual value. In functional languages, there is a data type called the option type, also called the maybe type. Its purpose is to encapsulate a value, which is returned from a function. […] In Java 8, the Optional class has been added to serve as an option type.