Today, I'm tackling Project Euler problem two in F#:

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...

Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

Like problem one, this is pretty trivial. It's a simple matter of filtering even numbers, taking only the numbers less than some value and folding to get the sum. However, a couple of supporting cast members need to be introduced.

First, I need a way to generate the Fibonacci sequence. There are several ways to calculate Fibonacci numbers (including a clever method that takes advantage of the relationship between Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio). However, I'll heed the heavy hints of the Project Euler problem description above and go with the iterative approach.

My first stab at writing a Fibonacci sequence generator in F# is simply an imperative approach, similar to what I might write in C#, wrapped in an F# sequence expression.

In fact, that looks remarkably similar to how I might write a Fibonacci generator as a C# iterator.

The F# and C# Fibonacci generators above are functionally equivalent. The obvious syntactic difference is that the F# version uses reference cells to support mutable variables. Because it uses reference cells, the F# version inherits a bit of operator baggage that might looks strange to C# developers. Most confusing is the unary ! operator, which is used to retrieve the value from a reference cell (i.e., i is a reference cell containing an int, and !i is the int contained within). This will likely look bizarre to many programmers used to C-style syntax where the unary ! operator is used to negate its operand.

I dislike the F# sequence expression approach above for one reason: it seems like a cop-out. It works fine, but it just feels wrong. There has to be a more declarative way to generate the Fibonacci sequence. Fortunately, there is! I can use the Seq.unfold function like so:¹

The generator function passed to Seq.unfold uses a tuple to represent both values needed to iterate the Fibonacci sequence. We can verify that this works properly using the F# Interative Environment.

OK. Almost done. I just need a way to take values from the Fibonacci sequence that are less than or equal to four million, and then stop. Effectively, I need something like the LINQ TakeWhile query operator. If I had that, I could use it similarly to the following C#.

I looked through the F# libraries for a function like TakeWhile but couldn't find one. Either I missed it, or it just isn't there (Don?). Fortunately, this function is trivial to define in F# with a sequence expression. In fact, it's the perfect opportunity to use a sequence expression because the code must interact with an IEnumerator<int>, which has an inherently imperative programming model.

It took a little while to get here, but now I'm ready to solve Project Euler problem two. To restate, we're looking for the sum of the even-valued terms from the Fibonacci sequence that are less than or equal to four million. No problem!

As stated last time, I want to present the most beautiful solution that I can. To me, that means the solution should be concise, and it should read like natural language. As before, we can achieve this by abstracting some of the logic into functions whose names better indicate the intent.

With these functions defined, we can rewrite the solution like so:

The beauty of this code is that it simply states the original problem:

Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the (Fibonacci) sequence which do not exceed four million.

F# takes care of the rest.

¹For those curious about how Seq.unfold works, check out my Apples and Oranges post. For fun, try generating the Fibonacci sequence in C# using the Unfold function presented in that article.