Recursion, Not Recursion

Had a great comment from my last post (about using Recursion):

I had to Google what "acyclic call graph" meant because I just couldn't remember :). I do remember what a call graph is... but...

So I showed my brother, Mr. Computer Science Professor, who is learning Elixir with me for fun and profit and he said:

Yep, he's right. Your use of recursion is interesting but it muddles things and it's not really recursive, even though you're using it that way.

Big brothers. Gah.

Here's the code in question:

defmodule Membership.DBResult do
  def map_single({:ok, res}) do
    cols = res.columns
    [first_row | _] = res.rows
    map_single {:cols_and_first, cols, first_row}
  end

  def map_single({:cols_and_first, cols, first_row}) do
    zipped = List.zip([cols,first_row])
    map_single {:zipped, zipped}
  end

  def map_single({:zipped, list}) do
    {:ok, Enum.into(list, %{})}
  end

  def map_single({:error, err}) do
    {:error, err}
  end

end

He went on:

A recursive routine typically performs some kind of operation that gets repeated. Here, you're doing three different things, abusing the notion of recursion.

And it hit me. Of course. As I mention in the very first post in my little Elixir excursion - I've used recursion in the past but certainly not regularly. It did solve a problem, but not appropriately.

Another lesson learned.

Anyway I refactored things a bit to a lot clearer and less of a muddle:

defmodule Membership.DBResult do

  def get_first_result({:ok, res}) do
    cols = res.columns
    [first_row | _] = res.rows
    {:ok, cols, first_row }
  end

  def zip_columns_and_row({:ok, cols,row}) do
    {:ok, List.zip([cols,row])}
  end

  def create_map_from_list({:ok, list}) do
    {:ok, Enum.into(list, %{})}
  end

  def map_single({:ok, res}) do
    get_first_result({:ok, res})
      |> zip_columns_and_row
      |> create_map_from_list
  end
end

I need to add some error traps in here, of course, but this is so much clearer! Thanks KMag - appreciate the nudge :).

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