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Is C++ Ready for Functional Programming? – Wrap Up

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Wrap Up

Recently I had the questionable pleasure of watching “Cosmic Sin” courtesy of Netflix. The movie is a sci-fi show starring Bruce Willis. I was lured into wasting my time on it, by the trailer promising a space-operish feat and I took the presence of such a star playing in the movie for a warranty on quality. I couldn’t be farther from the truth.

The movie plays out confusingly, lacking a coherent script and motivated actors, pushing the watcher into an undefined state (not UB luckily). The helpless watcher, astonished by how bad a film could be, hopes until the very last for something interesting and entertaining to happen until the mixed relief-disbelief emotion of closing titles puts an end to the suffering.

When thinking about C++ and functional programming I have some of the feelings I had watching the movie. Before being persecuted by my friends from the C++ community I have to make clear that C++ is not that bad, although there are some similarities.

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Is C++ Ready for Functional Programming? – Types

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Types

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Although functional programming can be done in a dynamically typed language (Lisp, the functional programming language forerunner, had no types), strong static type adds a very natural complement to functional programming.

From a mathematical point of view, a function sets a relationship between the set defined by the function argument (domain in math speaking) and the corresponding results (co-domain). Algebra studies exactly these relationships and may help the programmer in proving certain properties of the functions composing the programs.

Algebraic Data Types (ADT) are aggregated types in the algebra context. Two ADTs are of particular interest – sum types and product types. With sum and product referring to the resulting number of possible values (i.e. cardinality of sets).

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Is C++ Ready for Functional Programming? – Standard Library

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Time to take a closer look to the standard library from the functional programming point of view.

In the first installment of this series, I stated that using a library to implement functional programming structures would not be an ideal solution, but as C language pioneered in the 70s, part of the language finds its proper location in a library.

C++ standard library has grown disorderly oversize during the years, so let’s have a look at what kind of support is available for those that want to use C++ with the functional paradigm.

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Is C++ Ready for Functional Programming? – Functions, Functions for Everyone!

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In this second installment, I’ll look closer to the core of functional programming – functions. When I started programming, BASIC was the language of choice… the only available choice. And no, it wasn’t the quite convoluted Visual Basic, but the old plain, primitive BASIC with line numbers and poor syntax.

In those days I just used GOTOs and looked with suspicion at the GOSUB/RETURN wondering why in the world I would need to automatically return when I could GOTO everywhere I needed… But I’m digressing. It is just for saying that (besides yours truly could be not the best authority on this matter), programming languages have come a long way and the poor BASIC programmer had to spin the evolution wheel for quite a while to reach to concept of function as presented in this post.

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Is C++ Ready for Functional Programming? – Intro

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Design by committee (DbC) was never meant to be a compliment. In DbC, every decision has to go through a debate and be subjected to a political process. Because of the needed compromise among the parts, the resulting artifact usually tends to be clunky and patchy, lacking elegance, homogeneity, and vision.

C++ is quite an old language, not as old as its parent C, or other veterans of the computer language arena, but the first standard is now 23 years old and the language was quite well-formed and aged to mature its dose of quirks, long before that.

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Comprehensive For in C++

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Switching back and forth between Scala and C++ tends to shuffle ideas in my brain. Some ideas from Scala and the functional world are so good that is just a pity that can’t be applied directly and simply in C++.

If you carefully look into idiomatic C code for error handling, it is easy to find a lousy approach even in industrial code. I’ve seen a lot of code where not every return value was examined for an error, or not everything was thoroughly validated, or some code was executed even when it was not needed because an error occurred but was too cumbersome to provide the escape path.

In C++ things are a bit better, thanks to the exception mechanism, but exceptions are such a pain in the neck to get right and to handle properly that error management could soon turn into a nightmare.

Error handling in C and C++ is so boring and problematic that the examples in most textbooks just skip it.

(featured image by Nadine Shaabana)

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From C to C++ and back, but not for the reason you may think

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After six years of writing firmware in C++, I nearly forgot what it is like to develop in plain C.

In fact, I remember I wrote quite convoluted C macros to implement template-like containers, therefore when I was handed a prototype firmware to contribute, I thought I was quite fine. After all, I needed just to dust off my old library to be up and running.

Well in the past six years not only I wrote C++ firmware, but also I have been dangerously exposed to high doses of functional programming. Therefore my last C++ code looked a lot like (at least in my intentions) Scala code, just more verbose.

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C Strings, a C++ View

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The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal – at least according to Aristotle. On the other hand, software engineering tries quite hard to deal with unequal things in the same way. Think for example to the file system concept, it is very handy to deal with data in your hard disk in the same way you deal with data stored on a server across a network connection. As Joel suggests pushing abstractions too hard may hurt, but I think it is hard to disagree that it is very convenient to produce video output regardless of the screen resolution or manufacturer.

So, wouldn’t it be nice to deal with strings regardless they are null-terminated C strings or C++ iterable string? Yes of course, but what does the compiler think about this? Would it generates comparable, if not equal, machine code?

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Our Father’s Faults – Wrapping it up

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Well, I’m running out of anti-patterns and oddly looking code from the legacy of my job-ancestors. I thinks that there are a few that are worth mentioning but don’t build up to a stand-alone post, and then its space for questions and discussions and whether exists or not a way out.

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