[Haskell-cafe] Instancing "Typeable" for monad transformers?

[Evan Laforge]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 10:02 PM, John Millikin <jmillikin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there any reasonable way to do this if I want to cast a monadic
> value? For example:
>
>> castState :: (Typeable a, Typeable s, Typeable1 m, Typeable b) => a -> Maybe (StateT s m b)
>> castState = Data.Typeable.cast
>
> None of the common monad transformers declare instances of Typeable,
> so I don't know if the concept itself even works.
>
> The use case here is one of my library users wants to return an
> Iteratee from code running in "hint", which requires any extracted
> values be typeable. My first attempt at an extension-free instance is
> something like this:

I don't know if this helps in your case, but I get around this by
having the actual interpreted type be 'State1 -> State2 -> Result',
where the States are the arguments to run the monad stack, and Result
is what happens when you run it.  Then I mangle the input from the
user (which should be 'MyMonad val') by wrapping a 'run' function
around it so now it has the non-monadic type.  Then I just run the
function 'interpret' returns as a sub-monad: pull my state, pass it to
run, and re-inject the state it returns or rethrow any exceptions it
returns.

Should work, as long as you can do the 'sub-run' thing (is there an
official name for that?), it's certainly possibly with all the
"standard" monads but I don't know about iteratee.