Sunday, August 9, 2015

Approaching the Fold

"Approach the fold and cull th' infected forth"
-- Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
Act V, Scene IV, Line 43

Welcome


In Graham Hutton's excellent paper, "A tutorial on the universality and expressiveness of fold", the first function that is looked at is And.  Dr. Hutton gives And the following definition:

and :: [Bool] → Bool
and = fold (∧) True

The idea being that we give Fold an And function with a seed value of True.  If one of the members of the collection given is False the Anding it with True will yield a value of False and thus the end result will be False.  If no member of the collection given is False then the end result will be True.


Let us look at this in code.

Clojure




To create an Anding function we'll use reduce along with the and macro with a seed of true.  Since and is a macro, we'll need to wrap it in a function in order to be able to use it in reduce.

C#




We'll use the LINQ function Aggregate along && and a value of true to create an Anding function.

JavaScript




We see that by using lodash's foldl function with && and the value true we can create an Anding function.

ECMAScript 2015




Since we live in the future, we'll use Babel to allow us to use ECMAScript 2015.  We see again that by using lodash's foldl with && along with the value true we now have an Anding function.

Fin


There you have it the And function using Fold, showing once again that all you need is Fold.