Proposal: have "container" types override the `valueOf` method

I’m still digesting the changes in ap, and reading again the discussions in #50 and #144, and there’s a thing that bothers me. With the current specifications we have to access the value contained in another Apply directly and that feels very wrong (example here).

What about having all “container” types override the inherited Object.prototype.valueOf to get the contained value?

Should be useful in more cases, and for more reasons, than the ap one I’m mentioning now.

[davidchambers]

With the current specifications we have to access the value contained in another Apply directly and that feels very wrong

What makes it feel wrong to you?

The author of a data type knows how to access its private fields. Accessing the private value field of b is no different from accessing the private value field of this in new Id(b.value(this.value)).

👎 for doing anything with valueOf. It isn’t necessary, and the thought of specifying a method primarily used for type coercion is concerning. Furthermore it would be tragic to see people use Maybe#valueOf rather than safely unwrap a value with a function such as fromMaybe.

[safareli]

My point about interoperability, as I previously said, still stands though as another function could be used for the same purpose.

@ascartabelli to “extract” contained value you can define extract method from Comonad, but not every type is comonad and not every instance of type holds value (List.Nil, Tree.Leaf).

Basically we already have a method for extracting value from container, so i think this should be closed if there are no more things to discuss.