Borrowing Functional APIs from F#

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Nov 21, 2007

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Programming ,

.NET

Tags

C# ,

Visual Basic.NET ,

Functional Programming

The Common Language Specification ensures that any conforming .NET language can access libraries created by any other language. This means imperative languages like VB and C# can call functional libraries created primarily for F#. In fact, many can be converted directly into C# code.

Dustin Campbell illustrates this by showing how even simple C# expressions can be reduced in length. He starts with this code,

int[] a = new int[20];
for (int x = 0; x < a.Length; x++)
a[x] = x + 1;

Instead of a specific code recipe, this F# code says (in a more declarative fashion), "create an array of 20 elements, and use this function to initialize each element." An interesting feature of the F# version is that the type of the array is never declared. Because the compiler can infer that the result of the passed function (fun x -> x + 1) will be an int, "a" must be an int array.

To me, this code is beautiful. In addition, it is declarative instead of imperative; it describes what should be done but doesn't dictate exactly how it should be done. When I see such elegant code, I immediately start trying to figure out which of its aspects could be used to improve the code in my daily C# work.

Dustin goes on to show a C# function that allows for this syntax.

var a = ArrayEx.Create(20, x => x + 1);

It should be noted that these techniques work equally well in VB.

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   No F# code in this post

   by Neil Bartlett

   You've quoted the C# code where I think you intended to quote the F# code.

   Reply

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