[Haskell-cafe] Still stacking monad transformers

Jonathan Cast jonathanccast at fastmail.fm
Mon Oct 13 13:33:53 EDT 2008


On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 18:28 +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Reid Barton wrote:
> > It's not difficult: the operation is called
> >
> > mplus :: MyMonad a -> MyMonad a -> MyMonad a
> >
> > and already exists (assuming the author of ListT has not forgotten to
> > write a MonadPlus instance).
> >   
> 
> I see... I was under the impression that "mplus" is just any arbitrary 
> binary operation over a given monad. How do you know what it does for a 
> specific monad?

Process of elimination.  Sometimes, this doesn't narrow things down to a
single operation, but it gives you a good idea of what you're supposed
to expect.

Firstly, mplus and mzero form a (natural) monoid, put together.  That
rules out a number of binary operations right there.

Secondly, mzero has a null law with (>>=):

  mzero >>= f = mzero

So, if you have

  a `mplus` b

and a calls mzero at some point (not inside another call to mplus ---
nice and informal, that description :), then you know b will be executed
instead.  (Maybe b will be executed *anyway*.  I didn't say anything
about that).

So mplus and mzero are basically suitable for three kinds of things:

* Exception handling
* Back-tracking
* Parallelism

Usually, when you see a MonadPlus instance, you expect one or more of
these.

That's in the general case.

ListT is a special case; the (somewhat idealized) specification of ListT
(what people want to happen when they use ListT) is that ListT m in some
sense `adds back-tracking' to m.  Where back-tracking choice is
implemented by mplus.

jcc




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