Question

In an attempt to learn Haskell, I have come across a situation in which I wish to do a fold over a list but my accumulator is a Maybe. The function I’m folding with however takes in the “extracted” value in the Maybe and if one fails they all fail. I have a solution I find kludgy, but knowing as little Haskell as I do, I believe there should be a better way. Say we have the following toy problem: we want to sum a list, but fours for some reason are bad, so if we attempt to sum in a four at any time we want to return Nothing. My current solution is as follows:

import Maybe

explodingFourSum :: [Int] -> Maybe Int
explodingFourSum numberList =
    foldl explodingFourMonAdd (Just 0) numberList
    where explodingFourMonAdd =
        (\x y -> if isNothing x
                    then Nothing
                    else explodingFourAdd (fromJust x) y)

explodingFourAdd :: Int -> Int -> Maybe Int
explodingFourAdd _ 4 = Nothing
explodingFourAdd x y = Just(x + y)

So basically, is there a way to clean up, or eliminate, the lambda in the explodingFourMonAdd using some kind of Monad fold? Or somehow currying in the >>=
operator so that the fold behaves like a list of functions chained by >>=?

Answer 1

I think you can use foldM

explodingFourSum numberList = foldM explodingFourAdd 0 numberList

This lets you get rid of the extra lambda and that (Just 0) in the beggining.

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BTW, check out hoogle to search around for functions you don’t really remember the name for.