• Nevoic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Here’s an example (first in Haskell then in Go), lets say you have some types/functions:

    • type Possible a = Either String a
    • data User = User { name :: String, age :: Int }
    • validateName :: String -> Possible String
    • validateAge :: Int -> Possible Int

    then you can make

    mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
    mkValidUser name age = do
      validatedName ← validateName name
      validatedAge  ← validateAge age
      pure $ User validatedName validatedAge
    

    for some reason <- in lemmy shows up as &lt;- inside code blocks, so I used the left arrow unicode in the above instead

    in Go you’d have these

    • (no Possible type alias, Go can’t do generic type aliases yet, there’s an open issue for it)
    • type User struct { Name string; Age int }
    • func validateName(name string) (string, error)
    • func validateAge(age int) (int, error)

    and with them you’d make:

    func mkValidUser(name string, age int) (*User, error) {
      validatedName, err = validateName(name)
      if err != nil {
        return nil, err
      }
    
      validatedAge, err = validateAge(age)
      if err != nil {
        return nil, err
      }
    
      return User(Name: validatedName, Age: validatedAge), nil
    }
    

    In the Haskell, the fact that Either is a monad is saving you from a lot of boilerplate. You don’t have to explicitly handle the Left/error case, if any of the Eithers end up being a Left value then it’ll correctly “short-circuit” and the function will evaluate to that Left value.

    Without using the fact that it’s a functor/monad (e.g you have no access to fmap/>>=/do syntax), you’d end up with code that has a similar amount of boilerplate to the Go code (notice we have to handle each Left case now):

    mkValidUser :: String -> Int -> Possible User
    mkValidUser name age =
      case (validatedName name, validateAge age) of
        (Left nameErr, _) => Left nameErr
        (_, Left ageErr)  => Left ageErr
        (Right validatedName, Right validatedAge) => 
          Right $ User validatedName validatedAge