[Haskell-cafe] Merry monad mixup?

[Chris Smith]

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 11:20 -0800, michael rice wrote:
> The first and third work, but not the second. Why?

When you use a do block, it can be the syntactic sugar for whatever
monad you like; but you do have to make a choice.  Your first example
had a do block for the IO monad.  Your third example used the [] monad.
Both are fine.

The second, though, wasn't clear on what monad it was using.  When you
used the (<-) syntax to nondeterministically choose from a list, the
compiler settled upon the [] monad.  But then the next line was a
statement in the IO monad.  That's inconsistent, hence the error.

Perhaps you wanted to build a monad out of both behaviors?  In this
case, you should likely look into monad transformers, and in particular,
the ListT monad transformer in the List package.  This would allow you
to write the code you did in a monad called ListT IO, except that the IO
actions would need to be lifted through the use of either `lift` or
`liftIO`.

-- 
Chris Smith