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

[Ashley Yakeley]

> I got the impression you 
> could define anthing you liked for mzero and mplus - providing the laws 
> are upheld?

I agree that a law-based approach is the correct one. The "Monad laws" 
are well known, equivalent laws for Functor don't seem to be talked 
about so much but I doubt there'd be any argument about them, given that 
Functor is supposed to represent a well-defined concept in category 
theory. These are found in [1]:

  fmap id = id
  fmap (a . b) = (fmap a) . (fmap b)

I think it would be helpful if all these classes came with their laws 
prominently attached in their Haddock documentation or wherever. The 
trouble with MonadPlus is that the precise set of associated laws is 
either unspecified or not the most useful (I assume there's a paper on 
the class somewhere). I think everyone can agree on these:

  mplus mzero a = a
  mplus a mzero = a
  mplus (mplus a b) c = mplus a (mplus b c)

  mzero >>= a = mzero

But what about this?

  a >> mzero = mzero

It's satisfied by [] and Maybe, but not IO (for instance, when a is 
'putStrLn "Hello"'), but IO has been declared an instance of MonadPlus. 
And then there are the two I gave:

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

...which is satisfied by [], but not Maybe or IO.

  mplus (return a) b = return a

...which is satisfied by Maybe and IO, but not [], although your 
alternative declaration would make [] satisfy this and not the previous 
one.


[1] Mark P. Jones, _Functional Programming with Overloading and 
Higher-Order Polymorphism_, 1995

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA