[Haskell-cafe] IO () and IO [()]

[Jules Bean]

Henning Thielemann wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> 
>>>  I would like to know if in fact there's any difference in practice
>>>  between (), [()], i.e. if in practice the difference matters.
>>
>> Usually, not so much. A lot of Monad functions have _ variants, i.e.
>> mapM and mapM_. If you don't need the result, use the mapM_ version,
>> as it will run faster and not space/stack leak in some circumstances.
> 
> In my opinion, mapM_ and sequence_ are in the wrong class, because they 
> do not need much of Monads, or even Functors. They could well live, say, 
> in Data.Monoid class. However, it's hard to integrate that in a 
> hierarchy of type classes.
> 
> 
> instance Monoid a => Monoid (M a) where
>    mempty = return mempty
>    mappend = liftM2 mappend
> 
> where M is a monad type.


Surely you mean to say:

instance Monad m => Monoid (m ()) where
   mempty = return ()
   mappend = (>>)

?

That is the instance which is consistent with your text "don't need much 
of monads". Then sequence_ becomes mconcat, and mapM_ becomes foldMap 
(from Data.Foldable), or more directly mconcat $ map ...

See also Control.Applicative, for things which can be sequence_'ed or 
even sequence'd without being Monads.

Jules