Totalitarian

Totalitarian provides typesafe data structures for working with total (not partial) functions.

Disjunctions

It primarily provides the Disjunct type, a typesafe representation of a union type, utilizing a type intersection to represent the branches of the disjunction.

For example, a disjunction of an Int and a String can be constructed with

  val disj = Disjunct.of[Int with String](1)

or

  val disj: Disjunct[Int with String] = Disjunct("two")

whereas the following would fail to compile:

  val disj: Disjunct[Int with String] = Disjunct('three)

Appropriate least upper-bound types will also be inferred, for example,

scala> val disjs = List(Disjunct(1), Disjunct('two), Disjunct("three"))
disjs: List[Disjunct[Int with Symbol with String]] = List(1, 'two, three)

Transforming disjunctions

It is also possible to perform transformations on the values in a Disjunct. This is most commonly done using the when method, which takes handlers for each branch of the disjunction as repeated parameters, taking either a lambda on the disjunction's value, or just a value, like so:

val disj: Disjunct[Int with String] = Disjunct("two")
disj.when(
  on[Int](42),
  on[String] { s => s"$s!" }
)

This returns another new Disjunct[Int with String], in this example, containing the string "two!". Failure to handle any branch of the disjunction would result in a compile error, and it is this requirement of totality which gives Totalitarian its name.

The return type does not need to be the same, and the lambdas or values for each on-case may return any type. For example, this,

val disj: Disjunct[Int with String] = Disjunct("two")
disj.when(
  on[Int] { i => i/2.0 },
  on[String] { s => Symbol(s) }
)

would return a new Disjunct[Double with Symbol], in this example, containing the value 'two.

If, however, a when method transforms a Disjunct such that the same type is returned regardless of its input type, the return value is no longer a disjunction, and the return type will be the raw type. For example,

val disj: Disjunct[Int with String] = Disjunct("two")
val s: String = disj.when(
  on[Int]("an integer"),
  on[String] { s => s }
)