In the last posts about Eq, Ord, Semigroup and Monoid we saw that instances must comply with some laws.
So how can we ensure that our instances are lawful?
Property based testing
Property based testing is another way to test your code which is complementary to classical unit-test methods.
It tries to discover inputs causing a property to be falsy by testing it against multiple generated random entries. In case of failure, a property based testing framework provides both a counterexample and the seed causing the generation.
Let's apply property based testing to the Semigroup
law:
Associativity : concat(concat(x, y), z) = concat(x, concat(y, z))
I'm going to use fast-check, a property based testing framework written in TypeScript.
Testing a Semigroup
instance
We need three ingredients
- a
Semigroup<A>
instance for the typeA
- a property that encodes the associativity law
- a way to generate random values of type
A
Instance
As instance I'm going to use the following
import { Semigroup } from 'fp-ts/Semigroup'
const S: Semigroup<string> = {
concat: (x, y) => x + ' ' + y
}
Property
A property is just a predicate, i.e a function that returns a boolean
. We say that the property holds if the predicate returns true
.
So in our case we can define the associativity
property as
const associativity = (x: string, y: string, z: string) =>
S.concat(S.concat(x, y), z) === S.concat(x, S.concat(y, z))
Arbitrary<A>
An Arbitrary<A>
is responsible to generate random values of type A
. We need an Arbitrary<string>
, fortunately fast-check
provides many built-in arbitraries
import * as fc from 'fast-check'
const arb: fc.Arbitrary<string> = fc.string()
Let's wrap all together
it('my semigroup instance should be lawful', () => {
fc.assert(fc.property(arb, arb, arb, associativity))
})
If fast-check
doesn't raise any error we can be more confident that our instance is well defined.
Testing a Monoid
instance
Let's see what happens when an instance is lawless!
As instance I'm going to use the following
import { Monoid } from 'fp-ts/Monoid'
const M: Monoid<string> = {
...S,
empty: ''
}
We must encode the Monoid
laws as properties:
-
Right identity :
concat(x, empty) = x
-
Left identity :
concat(empty, x) = x
const rightIdentity = (x: string) => M.concat(x, M.empty) === x
const leftIdentity = (x: string) => M.concat(M.empty, x) === x
and finally write a test
it('my monoid instance should be lawful', () => {
fc.assert(fc.property(arb, rightIdentity))
fc.assert(fc.property(arb, leftIdentity))
})
When we run the test we get
Error: Property failed after 1 tests
{ seed: -2056884750, path: "0:0", endOnFailure: true }
Counterexample: [""]
That's great, fast-check
even gives us a counterexample: ""
M.concat('', M.empty) = ' ' // should be ''
Resources
For a library that makes easy to test type classes laws, check out fp-ts-laws
Top comments (4)
I was playing a bit with this and wondering if/how it would make sense to test a monoid for tasks. Any ideas? Particularly on generating a setoid for those types?
I think you have a typo in your Monoid instance. The string should not be empty for the test to fail
concat(x, empty)
is equal tox + ' ' + empty
by definition ofconcat
. Ifx = ''
thenx + ' ' + empty
is equal to'' + ' ' + ''
which is equal to' '
soconcat(x, empty) !== x
Ah, yeah, I missed the extra space in the Semigroup instance