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Elixir doesn’t even need a special syntax — it gets Haskell’s LambdaCase as a natural consequence of case being just another function, and the pipe operator alw

Elixir doesn’t even need a special syntax — it gets Haskell’s LambdaCase as a natural consequence of case being just another function, and the pipe operator always chaining by the first argument. Haskell’s >>= is doing something slightly different. ‘getThing >>= \case…’ means roughly ‘perform the action getThing, then match the result and perform the matched branch’ Whereas ‘getThing |> \case…’ means ‘pattern match on the action getThing, and return the matched action (without performing it). The >>= operator can also be used for anything satisfying the Monad laws, e.g. your actions can be non-deterministic.

tadfisher 2y ago
Pedantry: >>= can be used for any instance of the Monad typeclass. GHC isn't sufficiently advanced to verify that a given Monad instance satisfies the monad laws; it can verify that the instance satisfies the type definition, but for e.g. the identity law "m >>= return === m" the instance can still return something violating the law (not something substitutable with m).
behnamoh 2y ago
> ...case being just another function, and the pipe operator always chaining by the first argument. Interesting! I thought Elixir was mostly macros all the way down, like this article shows: https://evuez.net/posts/cursed-elixir.html https://evuez.net/posts/cursed-elixir.html Being able to pipe into def, defp, defmodule, if, etc. is fantastic! But apparently you say at least in the case of case, it's not a macro, and it's just a function which returns a monad—I guess it's the same effect afterall? Is that why people say Haskell can get away with lack of Lisp-style macros because of its type system and laziness?
- leifmetcalf 2y ago
  I was wrong about this. Case is a macro (a special-cased macro even, defined at https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/4def31f8abea5fba44d2d92b11a72f3f9c855efd/lib/elixir/src/elixir_clauses.erl#L236 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/4def31f8abea5fba4...), not a function. It works with pipes because in the AST it's a call, unlike in Haskell where case is its own thing.

tadfisher 2y ago

Pedantry: >>= can be used for any instance of the Monad typeclass. GHC isn't sufficiently advanced to verify that a given Monad instance satisfies the monad laws; it can verify that the instance satisfies the type definition, but for e.g. the identity law "m >>= return === m" the instance can still return something violating the law (not something substitutable with m).

behnamoh 2y ago

> ...case being just another function, and the pipe operator always chaining by the first argument. Interesting! I thought Elixir was mostly macros all the way down, like this article shows: https://evuez.net/posts/cursed-elixir.html https://evuez.net/posts/cursed-elixir.html Being able to pipe into def, defp, defmodule, if, etc. is fantastic! But apparently you say at least in the case of case, it's not a macro, and it's just a function which returns a monad—I guess it's the same effect afterall? Is that why people say Haskell can get away with lack of Lisp-style macros because of its type system and laziness?

leifmetcalf 2y ago
I was wrong about this. Case is a macro (a special-cased macro even, defined at https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/4def31f8abea5fba44d2d92b11a72f3f9c855efd/lib/elixir/src/elixir_clauses.erl#L236 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/4def31f8abea5fba4...), not a function. It works with pipes because in the AST it's a call, unlike in Haskell where case is its own thing.