[Haskell-cafe] The essence of my monad confusion

[Paul Keir]

On the wiki page for Applicative Functors (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Applicative_functor) a familiar characteristic of monads is quoted; that they "allow you to run actions depending on the outcomes of earlier actions". I feel comfortable with Functors and Applicative Functors, but I don't yet get that "extra power" that monads provide.

An example immediately follows that quotation on the wiki:

do text <- getLine
   if null text
     then putStrLn "You refuse to enter something?"
     else putStrLn ("You entered " ++ text)

For simplicity's sake, I modified it to avoid using the IO monad; the "text" binding is now provided by the first parameter, and (=<<) is used due to its similarity to fmap:

bar :: Monad m => m String -> m String
bar as = (=<<)  (\a -> if null a then return "nothing" else return "something")  as

This works fine, so bar ["Blah"] gives ["something"], and bar (Just "") gives ["nothing"].

But, I can get the same effect using a Functor (replacing (=<<) with fmap):

bar2 :: Functor f => f String -> f String
bar2 as = fmap (\a -> if null a then "nothing" else "something") as

Can anyone help me out of the swamp?

Cheers,
Paul
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