An illustrative problem (part II)

Mike Coffin took the bait. (Thanks, Mike!) Unfortunately, pasting code into the blog comments is a very poorly supported feature. Blogs about Python must be interesting. I'll recopy some of Mike's code here.

Mike said: While I prefer this:

int minimumIntegerInBox (Collection<Box> boxes) {
    int result = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
    for (Box box : boxes) {
        if (box.get() instanceof Integer) {
            result = Math.min (result, Integer.class.cast (box.get()));
        }
    }
    return result;
}

that would be cheating.

It isn't cheating, but it isn't answering the question I posed, either. It's more or less the obvious thing to do in Java or Lisp. But conceptually it is pretty primitive. I don't care about the machinery involved in traversing a list (the looping construct). I want to take a binary operation like Math.min and make it n-ary.

Mike gave a very complete solution, but I'm only going to reformat the relevant part:

public static int minimumIntegerInBox(Collection<Box> boxes) {
    Iterable<Box> intBoxes = 
        filter (boxes,
                new Function<Box, Boolean>() {
                    @Override
                    public Boolean of(Box domainItem) {
                        return domainItem.get() instanceof Integer;
                    }
                });

    Iterable ints = 
        map (intBoxes,
             new Function<Box, Integer>() {
                 @Override
                 public Integer of(Box domainItem) {
                     return Integer.class.cast(domainItem.get());
                 }
             });

    return minimumElement(ints);
}

public static int minimumElement(Iterable items) {
    return best(
        new Function<Pair, Boolean>() {
            @Override
            public Boolean of(Pair domainItem) {
                return domainItem.second() < domainItem.first();
            }
        },
        items);
}

That's a lot closer to what I had in mind, but these are untyped Boxes. I want to use parameterized Boxes.