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Comment by louthy

3 days ago

This is all very basic, instead you can use C#'s new static interface methods feature to create higher-kinded traits where you can properly generalise over a monad trait (or applicatives, functors, foldables, etc.), which is what I do in language-ext [0].

I'm not saying that implementing SelectMany for specific data-types isn't valuable. It certainly ends up with more elegant and maintainable code, but the true power of monads and other pure-FP patterns opens up when you can fully generalise.

* I have a blog series on it that covers implementing Semigroups, Monoids, Functors, Foldables, Traversables, Applicatives, Monads, and Monad Transformers (in C#) [1]

* The monad episode (my 'Yet Another Monad Tutorial') [2]

* An entire app generalised over any monad where the monad must support specific traits [3]. It's the program I use to send out the newsletters from my blog.

Happy to answer any questions on it.

[0] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/

[1] https://paullouth.com/higher-kinds-in-c-with-language-ext/

[2] https://paullouth.com/higher-kinds-in-csharp-with-language-e...

[3] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/tree/main/Samples/New...

5 comments

louthy

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FrustratedMonky  3 days ago

Serious question, at this point, have all F# features been fully incorporated into C#?

  • louthy  2 days ago

    Not discriminated unions, but they're coming (I think next version of C#). Although for now you can simulate them quite easily:

        public abstract record Either<L, R>;
    public sealed record Left<L, R>(L Value) : Either<L, R>;
    public sealed record Right<L, R>(R Value) : Either<L, R>;

    Pattern-matching works well with these simulated algebraic data-types. Obviously, exhaustiveness checks can't work on 'open' types, so it's not perfect, but you can unpack values, apply predicate clauses, etc.

    Other more niche features like type-providers don't exist either (although arguably those could be done with source-generators in C#). It's been a long time since I did any F#, so not sure if there's anything new in there I'm unaware of.

    • debugnik  2 days ago

      That will allocate for any constructed Either though. F#'s Result and ValueOption are value-types (structs), and value-type variants recently added support for sharing fields between variants when the name and type match.

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