[Haskell-cafe] Use forM_ with Maybe, it's Foldable!

[Felipe Almeida Lessa]

Hey,

Just wanted to share this little insight I had that I don't think is a
common idiom.  Often times I need to define:

  whenJust :: Monad m => Maybe a -> (a -> m b) -> m ()
  whenJust (Just x) f = f x
  whenJust Nothing _ = return ()

It always bugged me that you can't find this function anywhere.
Actually, you can find it on at least a couple of packages [1], but
you can't find it on a standard place.  Or can you?

A few days ago I decided to hoogle the type of whenJust [2] and what I
discovered is that

  import Data.Foldable (forM_)
  whenJust = forM_

For example, instead of:

  mfoo <- doSomething
  case mfoo of
    Just foo -> ...
    Nothing -> return ()

You may just write:

  forM_ mfoo $ \foo ->
    ...

There you go. I hope this is useful to someone =).

Cheers,

[1] http://holumbus.fh-wedel.de/hayoo/hayoo.html?query=whenJust
[2] http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/?hoogle=Maybe%20a%20-%3E%20(a%20-%3E%20m%20b)%20-%3E%20m%20()

--
Felipe.