RE [Haskell-cafe] Monad Description For Imperative

[Dan Piponi]

ok wrote:

> It is considerably more than a little revisionist to identify Haskell
> monads with Category Theory monads.

> So a category theory monad is a functor from some category to itself.
> How is IO a a functor?  Which category does it operate on?  What does it
> do to the points of that category?  What does it do to the arrows?

IO is a fully paid up Monad in the categorical sense. The category is
the category whose objects are types and whose arrows are functions
between those types. IO is a functor. The object a maps to IO a. An
arrow f::a->b maps to (>>= return . f)::IO a -> IO b and that can be
used to make IO an instance of Functor. The natural transforms eta and
mu are called return and join.

I make no claim that beginners need to know this stuff, but it's
useful to understand when you start having to compose monads and
create new monads.
--
Dan