Just for your fun and horror

[Elke Kasimir]

Another good exam question (Hmm!):

What does last (last (map return [1..])) lastly return given that
last (return (not True))?

I also would prefer "unit". "return" makes sense  for me as syntactic 
sugar in the context of a "do"-expression (and then please like an 
unary prefix-operat or with low binding power...).

An alternative sugary would be "compute": When a monad represents
a computation, "init" returns a computation with a result, not 
just the result:

foo x = if x > 0 then compute x*x else compute -x*x 

By the way, an alternative for "do" would be "seq" (as in occam) to
indicate that operations are sequenced:

getLine = seq
                    c <- readChar
                    if c == '\n'
                      then compute ""
                      else  seq
                                 l <- getLine
                                 compute c:l

But such a discussion has probably already been taken place some years
ago. It would be interesting for me to know the arguments that led to
the choice of "return" (and "do").

Elke.

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Elke Kasimir
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