Side-effecting without braces
Sometimes I find myself in following situation: I have nice one-expression method like this:
def formatUsers(users: List[User]): String =
users.map(_.userName).mkString(", ")
Now I want to print the results to the System.out in order to quickly check the result that this function produces.
Common way of solving this problem is to write something like this:
def formatUsers(users: List[User]): String = {
val result = users map (_.userName) mkString ", "
println(result)
result
}
Too much code for such trivial task. In Scala we can do better than this!
Here is the way you can improve it. At first we need to define small implicit conversion:
object SideEffects {
implicit def anyWithSideEffects[T](any: T) = new {
def ~(fn: T => Unit) = {
fn(any)
any
}
}
}
With this code I can make ~ method available on any object. The only thing it does - is executes function you provided and returns original object. So the result of this function is completely ignored (that’s because it’s return type is Unit), but it’s Ok for our purpose - it’s exactly what we want to archive here.
Ok, now we can use it. Here is my first attempt:
import SideEffects._
def formatUsers(users: List[User]): String =
users.map(_.userName).mkString(", ") ~ (s => println(s))
And, as you can guess - it works. But we can do even better! println is also functions that accepts one argument, so we don’t need to wrap it in another function:
def formatUsers(users: List[User]): String =
users.map(_.userName).mkString(", ") ~ println
Now it looks much better with much less code, isn’t it?
You also can use it everywhere in expressions. Here is another example:
def formatUsers(users: List[User]): String =
users.map(_.userName ~ println).mkString(", ")
It just prints all processed user names for me.
Generally side-effects is not very good thing, but sometimes than can be helpful. Debug output, that I demonstrated, is one example. Another good example is integration with Java, which consists mostly of side-effects. Let’s look in this code:
val frame = new JFrame
frame.setVisible(true)
useFrame(frame)
You probably already guess how we can improve this situation. Of course with our brand new, shiny ~!
useFrame(new JFrame ~ (_ setVisible true))
Hope you will find it helpful and enjoyed this post.
Small update about theoretical grounds
Seems that this approach even has some theoretical grounds. So if you are interested, it’s called K combinator and you can find some information about it (with code examples in Ruby) in this post.
Actually that post reminds me on another use case for the ~ method, that I’m using sometimes. It looks like this:
def createFrame = new JFrame ~ { frame =>
import frame._
setVisible(true)
setTitle("Test Frame")
setSize(200, 100)
// ...
}
I like this pattern because it makes intent of the code much cleaner and visually splits method in 2 parts: the first one defines object you want to return and the second configures it.
