[Haskell-cafe] About mplus

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 03:35:03PM +1200, ok wrote:
> I've been thinking about making a data type an instance of MonadPlus.
> From the Haddock documentation at haskell.org, I see that any such
> instance should satisfy
>
> 	mzero `mplus` x = x
> 	x `mplus` mzero = x
> 	mzero >>= f     = mzero
> 	v >> mzero      = mzero
>
> but is that all there is to it?  Are there no other requirements for
> MonadPlus to make sense?
>
> I also wondered why, once MonadPlus was added to the language, the
> definition of ++ wasn't changed to
> 	(++) = MonadPlus
> (with the MonadPlus instance for [] defined directly).

It was.  They changed it back in Haskell 98, as part of a grand program
of dumbing down the langauge...  Cale Gibbard says {{{I get the impression
there were a lot of people on the Haskell 98 committee who really really
hated polymorphism.}}}.

Stefan
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