[Haskell-cafe] dumb monad syntax question

Malcolm Wallace Malcolm.Wallace at cs.york.ac.uk
Mon May 15 10:48:11 EDT 2006


> I've been reading Phil Wadler's monad papers from the early '90s,
> and it's been interesting to see how the monad concept evolved over
> the course of those years.

> But I haven't been able to track down the first use of the "do" notation for
> monads.  Can anyone tell me where that came from?  I'd appreciate
> paper citations if it was presented initially in a paper.

I believe it was introduced by Mark Jones' "Gofer" system (the
predecessor to Hugs), in version 2.30, in the year 1994.

To quote the release notes:

    Gofer 2.30 supports a new, experimental syntax for monad
    comprehensions which we will refer to as `do {...} notation'.

Regards,
    Malcolm


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