[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Haskell XML Toolbox Version 9.0.0

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Gregory Crosswhite wrote:
>  Could you explain to me why HXT uses arrows?  I have never been able to 
> figure out what advantage this gives your library over monads.  Since 
> your arrows in practice implement ArrowApply, they are really just 
> monads anyway, so it seems to me that using arrows instead of monads 
> only serves to add complexity to the library without adding any 
> benefit.  Furthermore, by using arrows instead of monads people cannot 
> use the many standard monad libraries out there, but have to instead 
> write their own generalizations of them to arrows.
> 
> Is there some benefit that your library gets out of using arrows that I 
> missed which makes these costs worth it?

I have the same question.

It looks like the arrows in HXT are typed version of  CFilter  from

    Malcolm Wallace, Colin Runciman.
    Haskell and XML: Generic Combinators or Type-Based Translation?
    http://www.haskell.org/HaXml/icfp99.html

but it appears to me that representing them as

    type Filter a b = a -> [b]

allows the use of the list monad, which would highlight the similarity 
between list comprehensions and working with XML trees.


Regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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