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

[Jason Dagit]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 12:29 AM, Stefan Holdermans <
stefan at vectorfabrics.com> wrote:

> Jason,
>
> > There is one case where you can break out of a monad without knowing
> which monad it is.  Well, kind of.  It's cheating in a way because it does
> force the use of the Identity monad.  Even if it's cheating, it's still very
> clever and interesting.
>
> How is this cheating?  Or better, how is this breaking out of a monad
> "without knowing which monad it is"?  It isn't. You know exactly which monad
> you're breaking out: it's the identity monad.  That's what happens if you
> put quantifiers in negative positions: here, you are not escaping out of an
> arbitrary monad (which you can't), but escaping out of a very specific
> monad.
>
> > The specific function is:
> >      > purify :: (forall m. Monad m => ((a -> m b) -> m b)) ->
> ((a->b)->b)
> >      > purify f = \k -> runIdentity (f (return . k))
>

I guess I refer to it as cheating because the type signature of purify is
surprising the first time you see it, even if perfectly logical.

Jason
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