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Many shapes and the same function

12 Jan 2017

I was playing around with a small function in Scala and found it kind of interesting that you can express the same thing in different ways. We are writting a function that will fold over a string an accumulate on running parensToFloor a function that looks like:

def parensToFloor(c:Char): Int = ???

The most common way to write this function would be:

def myFn1(s:String) : Int = {
	s.foldLeft(0)((x,y) => x + parensToFloor(y))
}

What would it look like point free?

I arrived to a few options that didn’t work :

def myFnx(s:String) : Int = {
    s foldLeft 0 { _ + parensToFloor(_)}
//>error: Int(0) does not take parameters
//              s foldLeft 0 { _ + parensToFloor(_)}
//                          ^
}

this made sense to me but the following one…mmm I imagine the compiler sees that since foldLeft is curried then it makes sense but what does the compiler want?

def myFnx(s:String) : Int = {
    s foldLeft 0 apply { (x,y) =>_ + parensToFloor(_)}
// >error: missing arguments for method foldLeft in trait IndexedSeqOptimized;
//follow this method with `_' if you want to treat it as a partially applied function
//             s foldLeft 0 apply { (x,y) =>_ + parensToFloor(_)}
//              ^
}

so thinking about that and how to curry, I started trying to add parens around and see what happens and this worked:

    (s foldLeft 0) { _ + parensToFloor(_)}

Something that worked but it wasn’t what I was looking for (it needed a change to the definition of parensToFloor):


def parensToFloor(accumulated:Int, c:Char):Int = ???

//... more stuff.

def myFnx(s:String) : Int = {
// first the non working version same error as before
s foldLeft 0 parensToFloor

// than later evolved to because apply was missing
(s foldLeft 0) { parensToFloor }

then since we are here, might as well go and try and see what it looks like with operators (from a coworker):

(0 /: s) { _ + parensToFloor(_) }

An interesting thing is that the usage of parens and braces is something I still find confusing in time in Scala. The source of my confusion is not totally unfounded, in the docs we can see that:

however here we see that blocks can also be expressions…

I’ll have to leave this here. More to follow…

If you want to discuss this post, the best place right now for me is mastodon, please message me @roundcrisis@types.pl with your comment/question.