[Haskell-cafe] Generalizing catMaybes

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2011, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote:

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> On 1/7/11 21:56 , Tony Morris wrote:
>>  I am wondering if it possible to generalise catMaybes:
>>
>> (Something f, SomethingElse t) => t (f a) -> t a
>>
>> I have being doing some gymnastics with Traversable and Foldable and a
>> couple of other things from category-extras to no avail. Perhaps
>> someone else's brain is molded into an appropriate shape to reveal an
>> answer!
>
> Looks to me like you want something like:
>
>> mtraverse :: (Traversable t, Monoid m) => t m -> m
>> mtraverse xs = traverse mappend (mempty:xs)
>
> or possibly the same kind of thing using MonadPlus instead of Monoid.

This is not type-correct, isn't it?

Foldable.fold has the type, that you propose.


For me, the solutions of Dave Menendez make most sense: Generalize Maybe 
to Foldable and List to MonadPlus.