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by Christian Horsdal.
Original Post: In Search of Maybe in C#
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One of the things working in Scala has taught me about C# is that the maybe monad is nicer than null.
In case you're not sure what the maybe monad is: It's a generic type that either contains a value or not. In Scala as well as in F# this type is called Option and can be either Some - in which case it contains a value - or None - in which case it doesn't. This allows you to represent the absence of a value in an explicit way visible to the compiler, since Option<T> is a separate type from T. This turns out to be a whole lot stronger than relying on null to represent the absence of a value. I'll point you to an article about F#'s Option for more explanation on why.
Functional languages will usually let you pattern match over Option, making it very easy to clearly differentiate the case of Some from the case of None. In F# this look like so:
In C# we don't have this. The closest thing is Nullable<T>, but that doesn't work over reference types. But is Nullable<T> really the closest thing in C# to Option? - NO. As was pointed out to me in a recent email exchange the F# Option type is available in C# too.
Let's see if we can redo the above F# code in C#. First the declaration the name variable:
The F# Option type is part of the FSharp.Core assembly and the is actually called FSharpOption. Hence the line above. On to the nameOrApology variable:
Not nearly as clear as the F# counterpart. What's in the if part; what's in the else part. Not nearly as clear to me as the pattern matching in F#. We can do better, using this little helper extension function:
Which let's us initialize nameOrApology like this:
Now the two outcomes - a value inside the Option or no value - are much more clear to me.
This is OK. Although the name, FSharpOption, is not too nice. Some of the method names - e.g. get_IsSome - aren't nice either. More importantly: Another thing Scala taught me is that it's nice if Option can be used in place of a collection. But that's for another post.
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