Newbie qustion about monads

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003 16:09:11 +0100, Alastair Reid <alastair at reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk> wrote:

> So you should not interpret the '==' in the monad law as requiring you to 
> define an Eq instance.
>
> If you do define an Eq instance, it ought to be reflexive, symmetric and 
> transitive (i.e., an equivalence) if you want functions with Eq constraints 
> to behave in a meaningful way.

Thanks, I understand now. (Incidentally, the == I was defining was an
equivalence, AFAICS.)

> Also, although there's probably no necessity for your Eq instance to match 
> your notion of equality between computations (i.e., the == used in the monad 
> laws), I think you'll end up very confused if you define an Eq instance which 
> doesn't match in the same way that having Eq on pairs ignore the 2nd field 
> would confuse you.

Sure. I imagine only very specialized monads will need an Eq that
doesn't match the equality implicit in the monad laws. As Derek has
pointed out, I'm yet far from reaching a point where I should worry
about that :)

Thanks for your comments,

                                                           Juanma