I need a function like Seq.head, but returning None instead of throwing an exception when the sequence is empty, i.e., seq<'T> -> 'T option.
There are a jillion ways to do this. Here are several:
let items = Seq.init 10 id
let a = Seq.tryFind (fun _ -> true) items
let b = Seq.tryPick Some items
let c = if Seq.isEmpty items then None else Some (Seq.head items)
let d =
use e = items.GetEnumerator()
if e.MoveNext() then Some e.Current
else None
b is the one I use. Two questions:
Is there a particularly idiomatic way to do this?
Since there's no built-in Seq.tryHead function, does that indicate this shouldn't be necessary, is uncommon, or is better implemented without a function?
UPDATE
tryHead has been added to the standard library in F# 4.0.
I think (b) is probably the most idiomatic, for the same reason #Ramon gave.
I think the lack of Seq.tryHead just means that it is not super common.
I'm not sure, but my guess is that functional languages with Hindley-Milner type inference in general are sparse about implementing such specific functions on collection types because overloading isn't available and composing higher-order functions can be done tersely.
For example, C# Linq extensions are much more exhaustive than functions in F#'s Seq module (which itself is more exhaustive than functions on concrete collection types), and even has IEnumerable.FirstOrDefault. Practically every overload has a variation which performs a map.
I think emphasis on pattern matching and concrete types like list is also a reason.
Now, most of the above is speculation, but I think I may have a notion closer to being objective. I think a lot of the time tryPick and tryFind can be used in the first place instead of filter |> tryHead. For example, I find myself writing code like the following fairly frequently:
open System.Reflection
let ty = typeof<System.String> //suppose this type is actually unknown at compile time
seq {
for name in ["a";"b";"c"] do
yield ty.GetMethod(name)
} |> Seq.tryFind((<>)null)
instead of like
...
seq {
for name in ["a";"b";"c"] do
match ty.GetMethod(name) with
| null -> ()
| mi -> yield mi
} |> tryHead
You could define:
let seqTryHead s = Seq.tryPick Some s
It is of type seq<'a> -> 'a option. Note that I don't beta-reduce because of the generic value limitation.
Related
I would like to know the best way to interact with C# code from F# in a functional way, when I have to check null many times.
From C#, is easy because I have null operator
public bool Authorize(DashboardContext dashboardContext)
{
var context = new OwinContext(dashboardContext.GetOwinEnvironment());
var user = context.Authentication.User;
return user?.Identity?.IsAuthenticated ?? false;
}
From F#, I made this
let authorize (ctx:DashboardContext) =
match OwinContext(ctx.GetOwinEnvironment()) with
| null -> false
| c -> match c.Authentication.User with
| null -> false
| user -> user.Identity.IsAuthenticated
But I am not happy with this. What is the functional way for doing this right? I thought maybe some computation expression would help, but I don't know how to accomplish yet.
Option.ofObj will convert a nullable object into an Option. Then you can use the helpers already defined in the Option module. For example, part of the pattern that you've written there is already encapsulated by Option.bind.
let authorize (ctx:DashboardContext) =
ctx.GetOwinEnvironment() |> OwinContext |> Option.ofObj
|> Option.bind (fun c -> c.Authentication.User |> Option.ofObj)
|> Option.map (fun user -> user.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
|> Option.defaultValue false
Option.bind takes an Option<'a> and a function that takes the type 'a and returns an Option<'a>. When it is used in a pipeline it's a way of "mapping" a Some or filtering it out into a None.
I would say that the function you wrote looks fine actually, but this way might be considered a little bit more idiomatic, though it's arguably also a bit harder to follow in this example. Option.bind really comes into its own when it saves multiple levels of nesting.
It's worth noting that in both your F# function and mine we're assuming non-nullness of the Authentication and Identity properties and risking null reference exceptions when accessing their properties. That's in contrast to the C# method using null propagation. There isn't currently a built-in way to do that in F# but there are probably some advanced methods for simulating it.
It is also possible to do this with computation expressions. See the MaybeBuilder here.
I liked TheQuickBrownFox's idea of using Option.ofObj, but I still found it tedious to write with the built-in functions, so I wrote a custom operator to chain null checks:
let inline (>>?) f g = f >> Option.bind (g >> Option.ofObj)
With this operator, what in C# would be
user?.Identity?.IsAuthenticated ?? false
Becomes:
user
|> (Option.ofObj
>>? (fun x -> x.Identity)
>>? (fun x -> x.IsAuthenticated)
>> Option.defaultValue false)
Which is much prettier!
Disclaimer: I've been using F# for maybe two or three weeks total, so this might be completely stupid :)
I don't understand how the Value Restriction in F# works. I've read the explanation in the wiki as well as the MSDN documentation. What I don't understand is:
Why, for example, this gives me a Value Restriction error (Taken from this question):
let toleq (e:float<_>) a b = (abs ( a - b ) ) < e
But ths doesn't:
let toleq e (a:float<_>) b = (abs ( a - b ) ) < e
This is generalized all right...
let is_bigger a b = a < b
but this isn't (it is specified as int):
let add a b = a + b
Why functions with implicit parameters generate Value Restriction:
this:
let item_count = List.fold (fun acc _ -> 1 + acc) 0
vs this:
let item_count l = List.fold (fun acc _ -> 1 + acc) 0 l
(Mind you, if I do use this function in a code fragment the VR error will be gone, but then the function will be specified to the type I used it for, and I want it to be generalized)
How does it work?
(I'm using the latest F#, v1.9.6.16)
EDIT
Better/recent info is here: Keeping partially applied function generic
(original below)
I think a pragmatic thing here is not to try to understand this too deeply, but rather to know a couple general strategies to get past the VR and move on with your work. It's a bit of a 'cop out' answer, but I'm not sure it makes sense to spend time understanding the intracacies of the F# type system (which continues to change in minor ways from release to release) here.
The two main strategies I would advocate are these. First, if you're defining a value with a function type (type with an arrow '->'), then ensure it is a syntactic function by doing eta-conversion:
// function that looks like a value, problem
let tupleList = List.map (fun x -> x,x)
// make it a syntactic function by adding argument to both sides
let tupleList l = List.map (fun x -> x,x) l
Second, if you still encounter VR/generalizing problems, then specify the entire type signature to say what you want (and then 'back off' as F# allows):
// below has a problem...
let toleq (e:float<_>) a b = (abs ( a - b ) ) < e
// so be fully explicit, get it working...
let toleq<[<Measure>]'u> (e:float<'u>) (a:float<'u>) (b:float<'u>) : bool =
(abs ( a - b ) ) < e
// then can experiment with removing annotations one-by-one...
let toleq<[<Measure>]'u> e (a:float<'u>) b = (abs ( a - b ) ) < e
I think those two strategies are the best pragmatic advice. That said, here's my attempt to answer your specific questions.
I don't know.
'>' is a fully generic function ('a -> 'a -> bool) which works for all types, and thus is_bigger generalizes. On the other-hand, '+' is an 'inline' function which works on a handful of primitive types and a certain class of other types; it can only be generalized inside other 'inline' functions, otherwise it must be pinned down to a specific type (or will default to 'int'). (The 'inline' method of ad-hoc polymorphism is how the mathematical operators in F# overcome the lack of "type classes".)
This is the 'syntactic function' issue I discussed above; 'let's compile down into fields/properties which, unlike functions, cannot be generic. So if you want it to be generic, make it a function. (See also this question for another exception to this rule.)
Value restriction was introduced to address some issues with polymorphism in the presence of side effects. F# inherits this from OCaml, and I believe value restriction exists in all ML variants. Here's a few more links for you to read, besides the links you cited. Since Haskell is pure, it's not subjected to this restriction.
As for your questions, I think question 3 is truly related to value restriction, while the first two are not.
No one, including the people on the F# team, knows the answer to this question in any meaningful way.
The F# type inference system is exactly like VB6 grammar in the sense that the compiler defines the truth.
Unfortunate, but true.
I need my state to be passed along while being able to chain functions with the maybe workflow. Is there a way for 2 workflows to share the same context? If no, what is the way of doing it?
UPDATE:
Well, I have a state that represents a segment of available ID's for the entities that I am going to create in the database. So once an ID is acquired the state has to be transformed to a newer state with the next available ID and thrown away so that nobody can use it again. I don't want to mutate the state for the sake of being idiomatic. The State monad looks like a way to go as it hides the transformation and passes the state along. Once the state workflow is in place I cannot use the Maybe workflow which is something I use everywhere.
As stated in the previous answer, one way to combine workflows in F# (Monads in Haskell) is by using a technique called Monad Transformers.
In F# this is really tricky, here is a project that deals with that technique.
It's possible to write the example of the previous answer by automatically combining State and Maybe (option), using that library:
#r #"c:\packages\FSharpPlus-1.0.0\lib\net45\FSharpPlus.dll"
open FSharpPlus
open FSharpPlus.Data
// Stateful computation
let computation =
monad {
let! x = get
let! y = OptionT (result (Some 10))
do! put (x + y)
let! x = get
return x
}
printfn "Result: %A" (State.eval (OptionT.run computation) 1)
So this is the other alternative, instead of creating your custom workflow, use a generic workflow that will be automatically inferred (a-la Haskell).
In F# you cannot easily mix different types of computation expressions as you would do in Haskell by using Monad Transformers or similar techniques. You could however build your own Monad, embedding state threading and optional values, as in:
type StateMaybe<'T> =
MyState -> option<'T> * MyState
// Runs the computation given an initial value and ignores the state result.
let evalState (sm: StateMaybe<'T>) = sm >> fst
// Computation expression for SateMaybe monad.
type StateMaybeBuilder() =
member this.Return<'T> (x: 'T) : StateMaybe<'T> = fun s -> (Some x, s)
member this.Bind(sm: StateMaybe<'T>, f: 'T -> StateMaybe<'S>) = fun s ->
let mx,s' = sm s
match mx with
| Some x -> f x s'
| None -> (None, s)
// Computation expression builder.
let maybeState = new StateMaybeBuilder()
// Lifts an optional value to a StateMaybe.
let liftOption<'T> (x: Option<'T>) : StateMaybe<'T> = fun s -> (x,s)
// Gets the current state.
let get : StateMaybe<MyState> = fun s -> (Some s,s)
// Puts a new state.
let put (x: MyState) : StateMaybe<unit> = fun _ -> (Some (), x)
Here's an example computation:
// Stateful computation
let computation =
maybeState {
let! x = get
let! y = liftOption (Some 10)
do! put (x + y)
let! x = get
return x
}
printfn "Result: %A" (evalState computation 1)
StateMaybe may be generalized further by making the type of the state component generic.
Others already gave you a direct answer to your question. However, I think that the way the question is stated leads to a solution that is not very idiomatic from the F# perspective - this might work for you as long as you are the only person working on the code, but I would recommend against doing that.
Even with the added details, the question is still fairly general, but here are two suggestions:
There is nothing wrong with reasonably used mutable state in F#. For example, it is perfectly fine to create a function that generates IDs and pass it along:
let createGenerator() =
let currentID = ref 0
(fun () -> incr currentID; !currentID)
Do you really need to generate the IDs while you are building the entities? It sounds like you could just generate a list of entities without ID and then use Seq.zip to zip the final list of entities with list of IDs.
As for the maybe computation, are you using it to handle regular, valid states, or to handle exceptional states? (It sounds like the first, which is the right way of doing things - but if you need to handle truly exceptional states, then you might want to use ordinary .NET exceptions).
Suppose I have the following DU:
type Something =
| A of int
| B of string * int
Now I use it in a function like this:
let UseSomething = function
| A(i) -> DoSomethingWithA i
| B(s, i) -> DoSomethingWithB s i
That works, but I've had to deconstruct the DU in order to pass it to the DoSomethingWith* functions. It feels natural to me to try to define DoSomethingWithA as:
let DoSomethingWithA (a: Something.A) = ....
but the compiler complains that the type A is not defined.
It seems entirely in keeping with the philosophy of F# to want to restrict the argument to being a Something.A, not just any old int, so am I just going about it the wrong way?
The important thing to note is that A and B are constructors of the same type Something. So you will get inexhaustive pattern matching warning if you try to use A and B cases separately.
IMO, deconstructing all cases of DUs is a good idea since it is type-safe and forces you to think of handling those cases even you don't want to. The problem may arise if you have to deconstruct DUs repetitively in the same way. In that case, defining map and fold functions on DUs might be a good idea:
let mapSomething fa fb = function
| A(i) -> fa i
| B(s, i) -> fb s i
Please refer to excellent Catamorphism series by #Brian to learn about fold on DUs.
That also said that your example is fine. What you really process are string and int values after deconstruction.
You can use Active Patterns to consume two cases separately:
let (|ACase|) = function A i -> i | B _ -> failwith "Unexpected pattern B _"
let (|BCase|) = function B(s, i) -> (s, i) | A _ -> failwith "Unexpected pattern A _"
let doSomethingWithA (ACase i) = ....
but inferred type of doSomethingWithA is still the same and you get an exception when passing B _ to the function. So it's a wrong thing to do IMO.
The other answers are accurate: in F# A and B are constructors, not types, and this is the traditional approach taken by strongly typed functional languages like Haskell or the other languages in the ML family. However, there are other approaches - I believe that in Scala, for example, A and B would actually be subclasses of Something, so you could use those more specific types where it makes sense to do so. I'm not completely sure what tradeoffs are involved in the design decision, but generally speaking inheritance makes type inference harder/impossible (and true to the stereotype type inference in Scala is much worse than in Haskell or the ML languages).
A is not a type, it is just a constructor for Something. There's no way you can avoid pattern matching, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
That said, F# does offer a thing called active patterns, for instance
let (|AA|) = function
| A i -> i
| B _ -> invalidArg "B" "B's not allowed!"
which you can then use like this:
let DoSomethingWithA (AA i) = i + 1
But there's no real reason why you would want to do that! You still do the same old pattern matching under the hood, plus you risk the chance of a runtime error.
In any case, your implementation of UseSomething is perfectly natural for F#.
For the sake of using literate programming (i.e. cweb) in F#, I need to be able to forward declare functions (i.e. use them before defining them). I came up with two ways, both of them unpleasing. Can you think of something better (easier to use for the programmer)?
Nice, but doesn't work with polymorphic functions
// This can be ugly
let declare<'a> = ref Unchecked.defaultof<'a>
// This has to be beautiful
let add = declare<float -> float>
let ``function I want to explain that depends on add`` nums = nums |> Seq.map !add
add := fun x -> x + 1.
Ugly, but works with everything
// This can be ugly
type Literate() =
static member Declare<'a, 'b> (ref : obj ref) (x : 'a) : 'b =
unbox <| (unbox<obj -> obj> !ref)
static member Define<'a, 'b> (func : 'a -> 'b) (ref : obj ref) (f : 'a -> 'b) =
ref := box (unbox<'a> >> f >> box)
// This has to be beautiful
let rec id (x : 'a) : 'a = Literate.Declare idImpl x
and idImpl = ref null
let f () = id 100 + id 200
Literate.Define id idImpl (fun x -> x)
I used a tool that follows the same ideas as literate programming when creating www.tryjoinads.org. A document is simply a Markdown with code snippets that get turned into an F# source code that you can run and the snippets have to be in a correct order. (In some literate programming tools, the documentation is written in commments, but the idea is the same.)
Now, I think that making your code more complicated so that you can write it in a literate programming style (and document it) is introducing a lot of accidental complexity and it is defeating the main purpose of literate programming.
So, if I wanted to solve this problem, I would extend my literate programming tool with some annotation that specifies the order of code blocks that is needed to make the script work (and a simple pre-processing tool can re-order them when generating F# input). You can take a [look at my build script][1] for TryJoinads, which would be fairly easy to extend to do this.
The tool I used for TryJoinads already provides some meta-tags that can be used to hide code blocks from the output, so you can write something like:
## This is my page heading
[hide]
// This function will be hidden from the generated HTML
// but it is visible to the F# compiler
let add a b = a + b
Here is the description for the other function:
let functionThatUsesAdd x = add x x
And later on I can repeat `add` with more comments (and I can add an annotation
`module` to avoid conflicts with the previous declaration):
[module=Demo]
let add a b =
// Add a and b
a + b
This also isn't perfect, because you have to duplicate functions, but at least your generated blog post or HTML documentation will not be obscured by things that do not matter. But of course, adding some meta-command like module or hide to specify order of blocks wouldn't be too hard and it would be a clean solution.
In summary, I think you just need a better literate programming tool, not different F# code or F# langauge.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why aren't you going all the way and 'doing it properly'?
Using the function first:
<<test.fs>>=
<<add>>
let inc = add 1
Declaring the function afterwards:
<<add>>=
let add a b = a + b
Since functions are first-class objects in F#, you can pass them around instead -- which presents a much nicer (and still immutable) solution than forward references.
let dependentFunction f nums = nums |> Seq.map f
let ``function I want to explain that depends on add`` nums =
dependentFunction (fun x -> x + 1.) nums
Also, in most cases you should be able to use currying (partial function application) to simplify the code further but the type inference for seq<'T> is a little strange in F# because it's usually used as a flexible type (similar to covariance in C# 4.0). To illustrate:
// This doesn't work because of type inference on seq<'T>,
// but it should work with most other types.
let ``function I want to explain that depends on add`` =
dependentFunction (fun x -> x + 1.)
Finally, a good rule of thumb for using ref or mutable in F# is that if you're only going to assign the value once (to initialize it), there's probably a cleaner, more functional way to write that code (passing the value as a function parameter (as above) and lazy are two such approaches). Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but even then they should be used very sparingly.
As I said, this is wrong (and you should publish a blog article, or a FPish post, about why you're doing this)), but here is my take:
let ``function I want to explain that depends on add``
(add : float -> float) = nums |> Seq.map add
let add = (+) 1.
let ``function I want to explain that depends on add`` = ``function I want to explain that depends on add`` add