YinYang

What is this?

YinYang is a clean, simple binary disjunction, yet another replacement for scala.util.Either.

YinYang has no intrinsic bias, but users can import either a YinBias or YangBias. In a scope with a bias, YinYang implements all the conventional methods of a Scala monad, and is a full citizen of for comprehensions, including (unlike scala.util.Either) support for pattern matching, guards, and assignment within for comprehensions. Biased YinYangs behave as monads similar to Option, except rather than yielding None if something goes wrong, a counterbias YinYang can contain state describing the error or problem. Users should nominate a counterbias token that describes or represents "empty" -- the result of a pattern match or guard that fails.

YinYang began as a proposed improvement to scala.util.Either, see leftright, pull request, and SLIP proposal. scala.util.Either went another way, and so has this library. Despite changes, scala.util.Either still does not fully support Scala for comprehensions.

To use, you will first need to include a dependency, currently

"com.mchange" %% "yinyang" % "0.0.1"

and

import com.mchange.sc.v2.yinyang._

Example

Here is a simple example:

import com.mchange.sc.v2.yinyang._

val YangBias = YinYang.YangBias.withEmptyToken[String]("EMPTY")
import YangBias._

val a : YinYang[String,Int] = Yang(1)
val b : YinYang[String,Int] = Yang(99)

for( v <- a; w <- b ) yield v+w          // Yang(100)
for( v <- a; w <- b if v > 10) yield v+w // Yin(EMPTY)