The point is to parse the input into a structure which always upholds the predicates you care about so you don't end up continuously defensively programming in ifs and asserts.
The point is to parse the input into a structure which always upholds the predicates you care about so you don't end up continuously defensively programming in ifs and asserts.
I'd summarise boolean blindness as: implicit (often unsafe) coupling/dependencies of method results; which could instead be explicit data dependencies. That article's example is 'plus x y = if x=Z then y else S(plus (pred x) y)', which uses an unsafe 'pred' call that crashes when x is 'Z'. It avoids the crash by branching on an 'x=Z' comparison. The alternative is to pattern-match on x, to get 'Z' or 'S x2'; hence avoiding the need for 'pred'.
Another alternative is to have 'pred' return 'Maybe Nat'; although that's less useful when we have more constructors and more data (e.g. the 'NonEmptyList' in this "parse, don't validate" article!)