Am I right in thinking that molecule basically pro...

# functional

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Am I right in thinking that molecule basically provides monad comprehension over lists? Because it allows you to deal with each element of a flow as they come in and make a flow out of that, and you can do that for any number of flows you want, and so it's a monad comprehension, right?

[Nathan Bedell]

I think it essentially gives you monad comprehensions over `StateFlow`s.

It would be interesting to see if you could use the same mechanism to actually get a monad comprehension over lists / other nondeterministic monads though.

[Nathan Bedell]

@Youssef Shoaib [MOD] - Do you have an example of trying to use molecule for a list monad comprehension?

I'm trying to play around with this now, but so far I haven't been able to come up with anything reasonable.

[Nathan Bedell]

Ok, after investigating this a bit more, I'm almost certain it doesn't work that way. It's essentially a comprehension syntax for StateFlow, sure -- but I don't think it easily extends to a comprehension syntax for List or list-like monads.

You can definitely take two lists as input, put them into a flow, and attempt to use collectAsState to "bind" the list elements to a concrete list -- yet the results are not what you'd expect form the standard list monad.

Rather than enumerating all possibilities like you'd want in the list monad, you're essentially temporally interpolating between the different list elements you collectAsState.

Perhaps there's a less obvious way to make this work, but at least in the naive implementation I tried out, it doesn't work.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Very interesting, I wonder if there's sufficient hooks in compose to allow controlling the emissions of the flows so that it works like a list comprehension. Something that perhaps like waits until you fully process one item before it allows sending the next item through. Maybe some Channel based thing could be more helpful

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

@Nathan Bedell I think you should take a look at this... https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C5UPMM0A0/p1713984299484519
I DID IT!! Proper delimited continuations in Kotlin, including clean syntax for list comprehensions. Check out this test file for examples