[Haskell-cafe] Can we come out of a monad?

[Daniel Fischer]

On Monday 09 August 2010 21:19:01, John Lato wrote:
>
> I don't find purify2 particularly helpful because I almost never want
> to break out of any arbitrary monad; I want to be able to break out of
> a specific monad without knowing which monad it is, that is:
>
> purify3 :: Monad m => m a -> a
> purify3 = undefined  --the only possible definition...

Just to be obnoxious:

purify3 = const undefined

;)

>
> However, I just realized that something else is almost as good:
>
> evalCont :: Cont r a -> r
> evalCont k = runCont k id

Wouldn't you want the signature

Cont r a -> a

to break out? Also:

ContBreak.hs:6:23:
    Couldn't match expected type `r' against inferred type `a'
      `r' is a rigid type variable bound by
          the type signature for `evalCont' at ContBreak.hs:5:17
      `a' is a rigid type variable bound by
          the type signature for `evalCont' at ContBreak.hs:5:19
    In the second argument of `runCont', namely `id'
    In the expression: runCont k id
    In the definition of `evalCont': evalCont k = runCont k id

evalCont :: (forall r. Cont r a) -> a
evalCont k = runCont k id

would work (but is something different).

>
> As Cont is the "Mother of all monads", it can be used to emulate the
> behavior of any other monad.  If you had a library with instances of
> MonadReader, MonadWriter, MonadState, etc. (or operational
> equivalents) defined for the Cont monad, then you would have a purify
> function that works for all interesting monads (except IO, STM, and
> maybe ST), which is almost as good.
>
> John