[Haskell-cafe] Smarter do notation

[Dominique Devriese]

It's not the same as what you propose, but it's related, so for
discussion, I just want to point out idiom brackets (an analog for
do-notation for Applicative functors) which have been introduced in
some Haskell-related languages. Examples are Idris
(http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~eb/Idris/donotation.html) and SHE
(http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/~conor/pub/she/idiom.html).

Dominique

2011/9/4 Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> I was wondering what people thought of a smarter do notation. Currently,
> there's an almost trivial desugaring of do notation into (>>=), (>>), and
> fail (grr!) which seem to naturally imply Monads (although oddly enough,
> return is never used in the desugaring). The simplicity of the desugaring is
> nice, but in many cases people write monadic code that could easily have
> been Applicative.
> For example, if I write in a do block:
> x <- action1
> y <- action2
> z <- action3
> return (f x y z)
> that doesn't require any of the context-sensitivty that Monads give you, and
> could be processed a lot more efficiently by a clever Applicative instance
> (a parser, for instance). Furthermore, if return values are ignored, we
> could use the (<$), (<*), or (*>) operators which could make the whole thing
> even more efficient in some instances.
> Of course, the fact that the return method is explicitly mentioned in my
> example suggests that unless we do some real voodoo, Applicative would have
> to be a superclass of Monad for this to make sense. But with the new default
> superclass instances people are talking about in GHC, that doesn't seem too
> unlikely in the near future.
> On the implementation side, it seems fairly straightforward to determine
> whether Applicative is enough for a given do block. Does anyone have any
> opinions on whether this would be a worthwhile change? The downsides seem to
> be a more complex desugaring pass (although still something most people
> could perform in their heads), and some instability with making small
> changes to the code in a do block. If you make a small change to use a
> variable before the return, you instantly jump from Applicative to Monad and
> might break types in your program. I'm not convinced that's necessary a bad
> thing, though.
> Any thoughts?
> Thanks,
> Dan
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