[Haskell-cafe] one-way monads

Lennart Augustsson lennart at augustsson.net
Wed May 21 19:08:44 EDT 2008


I certainly don't use 50% IO monads.  I regard any use of the IO monad
except at the top level as a failure. :)

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Dan Weston <westondan at imageworks.com> wrote:
> Dan Doel wrote:
>>
>> On Tuesday 20 May 2008, ajb at spamcop.net wrote:
>>>
>>> Actually, it's true less than 50% of the time.  In particular, it's
>>> not true of any monad transformer.
>>
>> Sure it is. Any particular transformer t typically comes with some
>> particular way of writing a function of type t m a -> m a (you may have to
>> throw away some t-related stuff, of course).
>>
>> Since a specific transformed monad is built from a specific monad, and a
>> specific transformer, and specific transformers are likely to have a
>> function of type t m a -> m a, and specific monads are likely to have
>> functions of type m a -> a, you can compose them to get a function of type t
>> m a -> a for the specific monad t m. And so on for transformed-transformed
>> monads. :)
>>
>> That only fails if either of the specific pieces fails to have the right
>> function, which happens well under 50% of the time, I think (IO and STM are
>> the ones that immediately occur to me (barring a certain evil function),
>> although you could make a case for ST by technicality; no failing
>> transformers come to mind (except CCT if we're counting ST), but I haven't
>> wracked my brain very hard).
>>
>> -- Dan
>
> The claim was "less than 50% of the time", not "less than 50% of the monads
> in the standard libraries". I wonder what fraction of monads in real code
> the IO monad alone accounts for? 50% does not seem implausible to me.
>
> Dan Weston
>
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