[Haskell-cafe] Applicative and Monad transformers

[Jeremy Shaw]

At Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:01:09 +0100,

> I don't entirely follow what the OP's up to, so you may have a point, but it's 
> far from clear.  You're talking about the reader monad, whereas he's talking 
> about the effects in the ReaderT-transformed monad.

oops. Apparently I forgot to explictly state the issue :)

I am using ReaderT to lookup symbols in an environment. I am using the
inner monad/applicative functor to record whether the lookup failed or
succeeded. So I essential have the type:

> ReaderT [(a,b)] (Either [a]) b

[(a,b)] is the environment. In the end I get back a value:

 Either [a] b 

where [a] is all the symbols that weren't found or 'b' is the final
value. For example, if I have:

looker :: ReaderT [(String, Int)] (Either [String]) (Int, Int, Int)
looker = ((,,) <$> look "foo" <*> look "bar" <*> look "baz")

and none of the symbols are in the enviroment then I should get:

 Left ["foo", "bar", "baz"]

The issue is that if I use the free (?) applicative functor instance
for ReaderT then I only get back the *first* failure:

 Left ["foo"]

But, if I used my alternative definition, then I get back all the
failures. My concern is that my alternative version was somehow
violating an applicative functor law. My secondary concern was the
free version was somehow violating a law.

It seems though, that both are valid...

- jeremy