[Haskell-cafe] Re: what is inverse of mzero and return?

[Keean Schupke]

Aaron Denney wrote:

>You can, but the "other one" turns it into a copy of the Maybe Monad, so
>the current one is more useful.
>  
>
So what does this mean in terms of Ashley's question:

	But only some instances (such as []) satisfy this:

  		(mplus a b) >>= c = mplus (a >>= c) (b >>= c)

	Other instances (IO, Maybe) satisfy this:

  		mplus (return a) b = return a

Does it mean that both fall within the acceptable definition of the monad laws
for MonadPlus?

   1. |mzero >>= f == mzero|
   2. |m >>= (\x -> mzero) == mzero|
   3. |mzero `mplus` m == m|
   4. |m `mplus` mzero == m|

So I guess I must have missed the point because the distinction between say a monad on
[] and Maybe for example seems to me to be irrelevant to MonadPlus. The distinction comes
down to mplus being the same as skipError for Maybe and different for []. 

	Keean.