A Simple Monad Example

A Simple Monad Example

There's an excellent tutorial on monads here: http://onclojure.com/2009/03/05/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure-programmers-part-1/

Here's a very simple example of the use of monads, which are nothing more scary than a generalization of 'let'.

We'll calculate Pythagoras' rule in words.

Here are some numbers as strings:

(def integers (partition 2 '[1 "one" 2 "two" 3 "three" 4 "four" 5 "five" 12 "twelve"]))

This is a little recursion to look up a string or number and return its partner:

(defn swap
  ([x] (swap x integers))
  ([x lst]
     (if (=(count lst) 0) nil
         (let [[a s] (first lst)]
           (if (= x a) s
               (if (= x s) a
                   (recur x (rest lst))))))))

The function returns nil if it can't find a match. This seems reasonable behaviour for our pythagoras function too.

(defn buggy-pythag[xs ys]
  (let [x (swap xs)
        y (swap ys)
        x2 (* x x)
        y2 (* y y)
        z (Math/sqrt (+ x2 y2))
        zs (swap z)]
    zs))

Now (buggy-pythag "three" "four") is "five" as we expect, but sadly, if we call (buggy-pythag "one" "six") , then an exception is thrown.

The problem is that nils passed into the maths functions cause exceptions. In order to make the program work we'd have to wrap all the calls to swap in code to detect nils and return nil instead of proceeding with the calculation.

Fortunately, we can replace the let statement with a monadic computation which does just that. There's a built-in monad library:

(use 'clojure.contrib.monads)

The identity monad is an exact drop-in replacement for let. The maybe monad is like that, but also does what we want, immediately returning nil as the result of the whole computation as soon as it sees one produced as the value of an intermediate step. All we have to do is replace 'let' with 'domonad maybe-m'.

(defn pythagoras [xs ys]
  (domonad maybe-m
           [x (swap xs)
            y (swap ys)
            x2 (* x x)
            y2 (* y y)
            z (Math/sqrt (+ x2 y2))
            zs (swap z)]
           zs))

Now we can call our function safely on any two strings:

(pythagoras "three" "four")
(pythagoras "four" "five")
(pythagoras "one" "six")
(pythagoras "five" "twelve")