[erlang-questions] Nested Case Statements v.s. multiple functions

[dploop@REDACTED]

This problem also bothered me for a long time, so I write a parse transform to deal with it. To be specific, say we want to write a function which takes two integers and returns  the product and quotient of them.

muldiv(First, Second) ->
    case is_integer(First) of
        true ->
            case is_integer(Second) of
                true ->
                    Product = First * Second,
                    case Second =/= 0 of
                        true ->
                            Quotient = First div Second,
                            {ok, {Product, Quotient}};
                        false ->
                            {error, "Second must not be zero!"}
                    end;
                false ->
                    {error, "Second must be an integer!"}
            end;
        false ->
            {error, "First must be an integer!"}
    end.

Ugly, at least I think this "rocket" is not beautiful. Even worse, if requirement changed, you should modify this code on a large scale. To avoid this problem, you can just rewrite your code like this
muldiv(First, Second) ->
    do@([esugar_do_transform_error ||
        case is_integer(First) of
        true -> return(next);
        false -> fail("First must be an integer!")
        end,
        case is_integer(Second) of
        true -> return(next);
        false -> fail("Second must be an integer!")
        end,
        Product = First * Second,
        case Second =/= 0 of
        true -> return(next);
        false -> fail("Second must not be zero!")
        end,
        Quotient = First div Second,
        return({Product, Quotient})
    ]).

This idea came from the Haskell's do grammer, and to use this grammer, you just need to write a error monad.

This parse transform code is one module of my esugar(An Erlang Syntactic Sugar Library) library, and the address is (https://github.com/dploop/esugar) 

I'm glad to discuss with you about how to use it or improve it(because I just write this toy for fun at the begining).




dploop@REDACTED
 
From: code wiget
Date: 2017-09-25 21:25
To: Erlang-Questions Questions
Subject: [erlang-questions] Nested Case Statements v.s. multiple functions
Hello everyone,
 
As I get further into Erlang, I am starting to realize that some of my functions have been getting pretty ugly with nested case statements. For example, I had a nested case statement that looked something like this:
 
Send_update(Arg1) ->
case do this(Arg1) of
{ok, [Val1, Val2]} ->  
case do_that(Val1, Val2) of
{ok, [Val3, Val4]} ->
case do_this2(…) of 
….
 
It continued into this for another few functions, you get the picture - its ugly, and it is hard to read. 
 
So I went and I converted it to a top level function that would then call lower level functions like so:
 
 
send_update(Arg1) ->  
     case ... of
         {ok, [Val1, Val2]} ->  
             send_update(check_indices, {Arg1, Val1, Val2});
         Else ->  
             lager:error("ERROR: ..")
     end.
send_update(check_indices, {Arg1, Arg2, Arg3}) ->
     case check_indices(Arg2, Arg3)of 
         true ->
             send_update(get_values, {Arg1, Arg3});
         false ->
             lager:error("EMERGENCY: ….")
     end;
send_update(get_values, {Arg1, Arg2}) ->
   ...
     case ... of  
         {ok, [Val1, Val2, VAl3]} ->
             send_update(send_value, {Arg1, Val1, Val2, Val3});
         Error ->  
             lager:error("ERROR: …")
     end;
send_update(send_value, {Arg1, Arg2, Arg3, Arg4}) ->
    …
     Do_something(Args),
     ok. 
 
 
Now that I look at it though, both don’t look right. They don’t look like something I would write in any other language where I would just have if’s and else’s.
 
Is this the proper way to write Erlang? I know everyone has their own style, but I assume there is some accepted form of writing functional programs with deep nests.
 
Thank you for your advice!
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