Crate predicates

Composable first-order predicate functions.

This library implements an interface to "predicates" - boolean-valued functions of one argument. This allows combinatorial logic to be created and assembled at runtime and then used one or more times for evaluating values. This sort of object is really useful when creating filters and checks that can be changed at runtime with user interaction - it allows a clean separation of concerns where the configuration code can be used to build up a predicate, and then that predicate can be given to the code that does the actual filtering without the filtering code knowing anything about user configuration. See the examples for how this can work.

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
predicates = "0.2"

Examples

A few different examples of how predicates might be used:

use predicates::{predicate, Predicate};

// The simplest predicates are `always()` and `never()`, which always returns
// `true` and always returns `false`, respectively. The values are simply
// ignored when evaluating against these predicates:
let always_true = predicate::always();
assert_eq!(true, always_true.eval(&5));
let always_false = predicate::never();
assert_eq!(false, always_false.eval(&5));

// Pre-made predicates are available for types that implement the `PartialOrd` and
// `PartialEq` traits. The following example uses `lt`, but `eq`, `ne`, `le`, `gt`,
// `ge` are also available.
let less_than_ten = predicate::lt(10);
assert_eq!(true, less_than_ten.eval(&9));
assert_eq!(false, less_than_ten.eval(&11));

// The `Predicate` type is actually a trait, and that trait implements a
// number of useful combinator functions. For example, evaluating for a value
// between two other values can be accomplished as follows:
let between_5_and_10 = predicate::ge(5).and(predicate::le(10));
assert_eq!(true, between_5_and_10.eval(&7));
assert_eq!(false, between_5_and_10.eval(&11));
assert_eq!(false, between_5_and_10.eval(&4));

// The `Predicate` trait is pretty simple, requiring only the
// implementation of a `eval` function that takes a single argument and
// returns a `bool`. Implementing a custom `Predicate` still allows all the
// usual combinators of the `Predicate` trait to work!
struct IsTheAnswer;
impl Predicate for IsTheAnswer {
    type Item = i32;
    fn eval(&self, variable: &Self::Item) -> bool {
        *variable == 42
    }
}

assert_eq!(true, IsTheAnswer.eval(&42));
let almost_the_answer = IsTheAnswer.or(predicate::contains(vec![41, 43]));
assert_eq!(true, almost_the_answer.eval(&41));

Reexports

pub use self::predicate::Predicate;

Modules

predicate

Predicate