[Haskell-cafe] Sparse documentation

[Andrew Coppin]

Brent Yorgey wrote:
>
>     Is there a reason why the documentation for virtually every module in
>     Control.Monad simply begins with a line that says
>
>       "Inspired by some paper (http://www.ogi.edu/csee/~mpj/
>     <http://www.ogi.edu/csee/%7Empj/>)"
>
>
> It's probably because it was felt that the paper itself is better 
> documentation than anything that could be written in the comments.  Of 
> course, this may or may not be actually true.  It just seems to be a 
> particular quirk of the way the Haskell community generates, 
> disseminates, and consumes information.

It's probably damn useful to have the paper *as well*. You know, for 
some context, a nice overview, introductory material, etc. (I mean, if 
the link worked...)

It's also nice to have some brief comments in the API docs to say what 
the heck a particular module is even *for*, and provide enough info on 
the stuff in that module that you can quickly dip into it when you can't 
remember the name of something...

> Is there a particular module you're having trouble with?  Or just 
> griping in general? =)

After many hours tying my brain in knots, I *think* I need to use a 
monad transformer... but I've never ever done that before. So I'd like 
to learn how it works. (And then I'd like to figure out what standard 
monads are out there and what they do.) But the docs aren't helping me 
greatly in this regard. (I notice the Wiki is also somewhat devoid of 
any material on this subject...)

Essentially I want to run a parser on top of a parser, and I think maybe 
this is the way to do it.