In F# what does the >> operator mean?

Question

I noticed in some code in this sample that contained the >> operator:

let printTree =
  tree >> Seq.iter (Seq.fold (+) \"\" >> printfn \"%s\")
         


        

Answer 1

It's the function composition operator.

More info on Chris Smith's blogpost.

Introducing the Function Composition operator (>>):

let inline (>>) f g x = g(f x)

Which reads as: given two functions, f and g, and a value, x, compute the result of f of x and pass that result to g. The interesting thing here is that you can curry the (>>) function and only pass in parameters f and g, the result is a function which takes a single parameter and produces the result g ( f ( x ) ).

Here's a quick example of composing a function out of smaller ones:

let negate x = x * -1 
let square x = x * x 
let print  x = printfn "The number is: %d" x
let square_negate_then_print = square >> negate >> print 
asserdo square_negate_then_print 2

When executed prints ‘-4’.