this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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I'm not an OCaml person but I do know other functional languages. I looked into Alcotest and it looks like the function after "`Quick" has to be
unit -> unit
. Because OCaml has currying, and I thinktest_increment
already returnsunit
, all you should have to do is add an extra parameter of typeunit
. I believe that would be done like this:Now the expression
test_increment (1, 0)
returns a function that must be passed aunit
to run its body. That means you can change the lambdas to e.g. this:I don't know OCaml precedence rules so the enclosing parentheses here may not be necessary.
I'd also note that taking
new_value
andoriginal_value
as a tuple would probably be considered not idiomatic unless it makes sense for the structure of the rest of your code, especially because it limits currying like we did with theunit
being able to be passed later. Partial application/currying is a big part of the flexibility of functional languages.Edit: if you're getting into functional programming you may also consider calling
increment_by_one
"succ" or "successor" which is the typical terminology in functional land.Currying is converting a function with n parameters to n functions that each have one parameter. This is done automatically in most primarily functional languages. Then, partial application is when you supply less than n arguments to a curried function. In short, currying happens at the function definition and partial application happens at the function call.
Currently the type of
test_increment
is(int, int) -> unit -> unit
. What we want isint -> int -> unit -> unit
. The more idiomatic way would have this function definition:Which would require this change in the callers:
See, in most primarily functional languages you don't put parentheses around function parameters/arguments, nor commas between them - in this case, only around and between members of tuples.