[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] Functor => Applicative => Monad

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi,

John Smith wrote:
> I would like to formally propose that Monad become a subclass of
> Applicative

A lot of code would break because of this change, but all problems 
should be reported at compile time, and are easy to fix. In most of the 
cases, either adding obvious Functor and Applicative instances to a 
library; or deleting such instances from a client, I would expect. This 
kind of clean-up would actually increase the quality of the library, 
however, and might therefore be acceptable.

> The change is  described on the wiki at
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functor-Applicative-Monad_Proposal

There you write, among other things:
> fail should be removed from Monad; a failed pattern match could error in the same way as is does for pure code.

How is this part of the proposal related to Functor and Applicative?

Since code depending on the current behavior can not be detected at 
compile time, this is a more serious change in a way: code keeps 
compiling but changes its meaning. Can you estimate how much code would 
break because of this change?

Would it be possible to keep user-defined failure handling in do 
notation without keeping fail in Monad?

   Tillmann