Monads and Maybe

[C T McBride]

Hi

> > As an example, I'll use the Maybe monad. Suppose I want to write code to
> > handle experimental data, in which there might be missing values. I might
> > then decide to represent measurements by data of type "Maybe Double", with
> > missing values represented by "Nothing". I could then go on to define
> > functions on missing values, which would return "Nothing" when their
> > argument is "Nothing", and I could string these functions together via the
> > monad mechanism. Fine.  But how would I handle e.g. addition of two such
> > values? The result should be "Nothing" when either of its arguments is
> > "Nothing". Is there any mechanism to handle that?
>
> Yes, liftM2. Defined in module Monad (or Data.Monad resp.).
>
> > Konrad.
>
> Wolfgang

Or, more generally,

  infixl 9 <$>

  (<$>) :: Monad m => m (s -> t) -> m s -> m t
  mf <$> ms =
    do f <- mf
       s <- ms
       return (f s)

Now your lifted sum is

  return (+) <$> mx <$> my

Being a sick type class hacker (a symptom of the Haskell guilt caused by
working with dependent types) I've constructed an overloaded operator

  fun :: Monad m => (t0 -> ... -> tn) -> (m t0 -> ... -> m tn)

where tn is of ground type. Effectively

  fun f x0 ... xn-1 = return f <$> x0 <$> ... <$> xn-1

In fact, it's good to weaken the requirement (on fun and <^>) from `being
a Monad' to being Fun, where

  class Fun f where
    eta :: x -> f x
    (<$>) :: f (s -> t) -> f s -> f t

`supporting return and <$>', as there are plenty of such structures which
are not monadic (eg. lists wrt repeat and zipWith ($)).

It's even more fun to work with lifted functors

  class LFunctor f where
    (<^>) :: Fun m => (s -> m t) -> f s -> m (f t)

with, for example

  instance LFunctor [] where
    f <^> []       = fun []
    f <^> (x : xs) = fun (:) (f x) (f <^> xs)

You can use <^> to define mapping, flattening and all sorts of other
goodies.

What it comes down to, I suppose, is that sometimes we want to use the
functional idiom to write programs modulo some modality, eg Maybe-ness
statefulness, non-determinism, etc. I guess that Arrows generalize all
this stuff still further, but the Fun class above is cheap and remarkably
cheerful. I use it all the time...

Cheers

Conor