Can Nullable be used as a functor in C#?

Question

Consider the following code in C#.

public int Foo(int a)
{
    // ...
}

// in some other method

int? x = 0;

x = Foo(x);

The last line will return a compilation error cannot convert from 'int?' to 'int' which is fair enough. However, for example in Haskell there is Maybe which is a counterpart to Nullable in C#. Since Maybe is a Functor I would be able to apply Foo to x using fmap. Does C# have a similar mechanism?

Answer 1

We can implement such functionality ourselves:

public static class FuncUtils {

    public static Nullable<R> Fmap<T, R>(this Nullable<T> x, Func<T, R> f)
        where T : struct
        where R : struct {
        if(x != null) {
            return f(x.Value);
        } else {
            return null;
        }
    }

}

Then we can use it with:

int? x = 0;
x = x.Fmap(Foo);

It will thus call the function Foo if x is not null. It will wrap the result back in a Nullable<R>. In case x is null, it will return a Nullable<R> with null.

Or we can write a more equivalent function (like fmap in Haskell) where we have a function Fmap that takes as input a Func<T, R> and returns a Func<Nullable<T>, Nullable<R>> so that we can then use it for a certain x:

public static class FuncUtils {

    public static Func<Nullable<T>, Nullable<R>> Fmap<T, R>(Func<T, R> f)
        where T : struct
        where R : struct {
        return delegate (Nullable<T> x) {
            if(x != null) {
                return f(x.Value);
            } else {
                return null;
            }
        };
    }

}

We can then use it like:

var fmapf = FuncUtils.Fmap<int, int>(Foo);
fmapf(null);  // -> null
fmapf(12);    // -> Foo(12) as int?