Threading monads

[Mark Carroll]

I could give an example, actually, which might make things clearer. Take
one of my unfoldM's:

unfoldM f base =
    do fb <- f base
       case fb of
	   Nothing     -> return []
	   Just (a, b) -> do rest <- unfoldM f b
			     return (a : rest)

Now, using the Identity monad I can write a wrapper for non-monadic f's:

myUnfoldr f b =
    runIdentity (unfoldM (return . f) b)

which works the same as a regular unfoldr. With a monadic function and a
wrapper that uses the Identity monad, I can offer both monadic and
non-monadic interfaces to the unfolding functionality that is only
implemented once.

Is this a good design idea? Are there better ones? Is myUnfoldr
necessarily less efficient than a "normal" unfoldr that doesn't have
monads underneath constraining evaluation order?

-- Mark