Railway Oriented Programming and partial application

Question

I like using ROP when I have to deal with IO/Parsing strings/...

However let's say that I have a function taking 2 parameters. How can you do clean/readable partial application when your 2 parameters are already a Result<'a,'b> (not necessary same 'a, 'b)?

For now, what I do is that I use tuple to pass parameters and use the function below to get a Result of a tuple so I can then bind my function with this "tuple-parameter".

/// Transform a tuple of Result in a Result of tuple
let tupleAllResult x =
    match (fst x, snd x) with
    | Result.Ok a, Result.Ok b    -> (a,b) |> Result.Ok
    | Result.Ok a, Result.Error b -> b |> Result.Error
    | Result.Error a, _           -> a |> Result.Error

let f (a: 'T, b: 'U) = // something

(A, B) |> tupleAllResult
       |> (Result.bind f)

Any good idea?

Here what I wrote, which works but might not be the most elegant

let resultFunc (f: Result<('a -> Result<'b, 'c>), 'd>) a =
    match f with
    | Result.Ok g    -> (g a) |> Result.Ok |> Result.flatten
    | Result.Error e -> e |> Result.Error  |> Result.flatten

Answer 1

I am not seeing partial application in your example, a concept related to currying and argument passing -- that's why I am assuming that you are after the monadic apply, in that you want to transform a function wrapped as a Result value into a function that takes a Result and returns another Result.

let (.>>.) aR bR = // This is "tupleAllResult" under a different name
    match aR, bR with
    | Ok a, Ok b -> Ok(a, b)
    | Error e, _ | _, Error e -> Error e
// val ( .>>. ) : aR:Result<'a,'b> -> bR:Result<'c,'b> -> Result<('a * 'c),'b>

let (<*>) fR xR = // This is another name for "apply"
    (fR .>>. xR) |> Result.map (fun (f, x) -> f x)
// val ( <*> ) : fR:Result<('a -> 'b),'c> -> xR:Result<'a,'c> -> Result<'b,'c>

The difference to what you have in your question is map instead of bind in the last line.

Now you can start to lift functions into the Result world:

let lift2 f xR yR =
    Ok f <*> xR <*> yR
// val lift2 :
//   f:('a -> 'b -> 'c) -> xR:Result<'a,'d> -> yR:Result<'b,'d> -> Result<'c,'d>

let res : Result<_,unit> = lift2 (+) (Ok 1) (Ok 2) 
// val res : Result<int,unit> = Ok 3