[Haskell-cafe] On the parallel between java annotations and monads

[Eugene Kirpichov]

Could you clarify on what is the precise relationship between the
annotations and monads? Or at least an example, like, "The @Foo
annotation corresponds to the Cont monad in the following way:..."

I personally don't see any connection at all, although I'm rather
familiar with both.


2009/7/3 Rafael Almeida <almeidaraf at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> After an extensive search (5 minutes googling) I could not find any comparison
> between Java annotations (or Python annotations for that matter) and Monads. I
> think they are similar in various aspects and I want to discuss them here.
>
> I'm sure several of you have experience with Java programming and its annotation
> system. At first they seem like an extension to the typing system, by using
> annotations a single variable or method may have more than one type: the real
> type and all the annotations types. The way you declare them is not important
> for this discussion, but assume that you've created the annotations
> GreaterThanFive and LessThanTwenty, you could annotate a method like
> this (let's
> forget about all the class verbosity for a while):
>
>        @GreaterThanFive @LessThanTwenty int doYourThing();
>
> You could than use reflection to read those annotations and you could check if
> the returned integer is in the correct range. You could even make the compiler
> generate code that will do that checking automatically for you.
>
> Even though that was my first impression of them, that's not really
> how they are
> used in practice (at least the practice that I have experimented). People use
> them to implement Monad-like features to the language. Actually, you can forget
> monad and think of computation containers.
>
> On an EJB environment there's something called a container and it will do all
> sorts of computations when you call an annotated method or when you
> create a new
> annotated class. For instance, if, inside of an entity bean, you annotate a
> variable like this:
>
>        @Column(name = "NAME") private String name;
>
> then, when you create a method like so:
>
>        public String getName()
>        {
>                return name;
>        }
>
> that name is actually something retrieved from the database, even though, it
> looks just like something in memory. As far as I know the interaction with
> monads for handling databases is not very different. There are other annotations
> which allows the container to "inject" some object on a variable, such as:
>
>        @PersistenceContext private EntityManager entityManager;
>
> now you won't even create an EntityManager instance, but will use the object
> living inside the container. I compare that to getting a value from an State
> Monad. Like there, you'll do some computations using entityManager, but it will
> ultimately be returned to the container.
>
> While each computational container in Haskell is very rigid and well
> defined, in
> java there's nothing rigorous about the annotation. However, quite often the
> annotations in Java are used in a manner similar to the implementation of a
> Monad in Java.
>
> []'s
> Rafael
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-- 
Eugene Kirpichov
Web IR developer, market.yandex.ru