-- Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2
Act V, Scene I, Line 120
Leap Year
Leap year, one of the time based banes of a programmers' existence.
The rules around if a year is a leap year are simple enough.
The rules around if a year is a leap year are simple enough.
if year is divisible by 400 then
is_leap_year
else if year is divisible by 100 then
not_leap_year
else if year is divisible by 4 then
is_leap_year
else
not_leap_year
C#
Note, if we want to do it the most efficient way possible we could just use the built in DateTime.IsLeapYear, but the point of the kata is to implement the algorithm yourself in order to learn something.
Here is an example using C# with NUnit for the testing.
We see that we can just implement the algorithm as a series of conditional statements. We also see that with NUnit we can use the TestCase attribute which allows us to just give the input along with the expected result. This kind of testing I feel leads to more readable test cases which focus on the data and not the steps needed. Having a test case which focuses on the data is the right approach in my opinion for testing a pure calculation based function like this.
Haskell
Note, this looks a lot like the code on Rosetta Code for the TDD Haskell implementation of Leap Year, because it is the same code that I contributed there for that entry.
This Haskell solution uses pattern matching. If you are new to pattern matching you can think of it as a switch statement.
With this style of pattern matching in Haskell we would get an error message if we call the function without a value which was covered, but the otherwise keyword at the end covers everything else so getting an exception would not happen. Comparing this to the C# solution with a series of conditional statements the Haskell caller knows that every input is covered by the function whilst the C# call will have to hope that all input cases are covered.
Scala
Note, this is my third Scala kata ever, as such I need to look at this gist form Kingsley Davies in order to do the kata.
With the Scala solution we are again using pattern matching, but this time we are doing all of the testing in a tuple which we are matching against (note, we could have done this in the Haskell and below in the F# solution). Using this style of pattern matching we are matching against a pattern but in this case I feel that the algorithm is hidden, as such for this function I do not think this is an improvement over the Haskell solution above (note, I did this on purpose to try out this approach with this solution to see what it would look like).
F#
This last solution using F# uses Active Pattern Matching. Personally I find the Active Pattern Matching with a Maybe Monad very readable. We can see that the algorithm states if the year is divisible by 400 we have leap year, but if it is divisible by 100 we do not.
Note, you can do this pattern in Scala and Haskell.
Conclusion
We see above 4 somewhat different ways to find if a year is a Leap Year. All these approaches used unit testing frameworks along with TDD. None of the solutions are the way to do it, but each look at the problem from a different point-of-view.
