[Haskell-cafe] Still stacking monad transformers

[Andrew Coppin]

Jonathan Cast wrote:
>> 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.
>   

Right. OK. So... isn't there a class somewhere called MonadChoice or 
similar, which defines (<|>)?