That looks like something I'd have concocted 20 years ago. Oh yeah let's chain expressions with functors in order to wrap the behaviour of a simple if statement. Campus party at 8.
Example: While programming kotlin, intellij idea warned me whenever I accessed a nullable object without a null check, and gave suggestions to convert types to non-nullable in order to avoid the checks altogether whenever appropriate.
I think there is value in keeping the code clean while keeping it correct at the same time, but that should be done at the compiler or linter level.
auto askForUsername = [&] { … };
auto lookupUserByName = [&](auto name) { … };
auto printUserDetails = [&](auto userId) { … };
auto details =
askForUsername()
.and_then(lookupUserByName)
.and_then(printUserDetails);Enforcing behavior via the typing system prevents bad code from even compiling and running in the first place.
When you stop thinking of Optional<T> as a inconvenient wrapper clumsily wrapping a T and starting thinking of it as a first class datatype with its own members and methods, then it becomes a lot more clear to reason about the logic.
You're right and I've made a fool of myself. My apologies.