[Haskell-cafe] does () match with a??

[Ivan Miljenovic]

On 8 July 2010 10:55, Hector Guilarte <hectorg87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> I'm making a Game Monad for an assignment (yes, homework) . Here's a little
> explanation of what I need to do (I can't use anything from Control.Monad.*,
> I need to do everything myself):
> I need to define my newtype Game and make it's Monad instance
> I need to make the function :
> runGame :: Game a            -- A particular game
>               -> Int                   -- Initial amount of lives
>               -> Maybe (a , Int ) -- Result and remaining lives.
> I need to make the instance for this class:
> class Monad m = > GameMonad m where
>   extraLife :: m ()
>   getLives   :: m Int
>   checkPoint :: m a -> m a
>   die        :: m a
> now what I've done (I was inspired by the State Monad)
> I defined my Game type as follows:
>> newtype Game r = Game { execGame :: Int -> Maybe (r,Int) }
> My Monad instance like this:
>> instance Monad Game where
>>     return a = Game $ \r -> Just (a,r)
>>     m >>= k  = Game $ \r -> let x = execGame m r
>>         in case x of
>>           Just (a, r') -> execGame (k a) r'
>>           Nothing      -> Nothing
> and my GameMonad instance:
>> instance GameMonad Game where
>>   extraLife    = Game $ \l -> Just ((),l+1)
>>   getLives     = Game $ \l -> Just (l,l)
>>   die          = do
>>     n <- getLives
>>     Game $ \_ -> Just ((),n-1) -- Here's the problem
> so, what's bothering me? Look at the type signature of die in the GameMonad
> class, it's supposed to return something of type (m a), but I don't know
> what to return in that case, and whatever I try to return it doesn't work,
> because when I try to compile it says that it couldn't match expected type
> 'a' against infered type 'whatever' ('whatever' being anything, from (), to
> string, or a number). shouldn't 'a' match with anything I put there?
> Note that I can't change the signatures because they were giving to me that
> way and I already checked with teacher if they were right. (I fixed it
> returning Maybe (Maybe a, Int) instead, but I can't change the signature of
> the function runGame)

The `die' function doesn't make much sense, because as you've intuited
it must be of _any_ type.  You could have "die = return undefined"
which matches the type signature, but isn't very helpfull, especially
if you try to use the value inside the Monad.

The only other option you have is to use `error', similar to the
default fail method in Monad but with a set message.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com