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

[Antoine Latter]

2010/12/14 Tillmann Rendel <rendel at informatik.uni-marburg.de>:
> 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?
>

When this change was made for the 'Either' monad, I remember that it
introduced sneaky runtime bugs into the, I think, HTTP library. So
your concerns are founded.

I really think that these proposals should be considered separately,
even if they would be enacted at the same time if they both passed.

Antoine