[Haskell-cafe] Is there a generic way to detect "mzero"?

[Ting Lei]

Hi,

I was writing a code trying to use MonadPlus to detect some error cases (representing missing values etc. in pure code). With the Maybe monad, I can do this:

can0 :: (a -> Maybe b) -> a -> Bool
can0 f x = case f x of
                  Nothing -> False
                  Just  x -> True

And I got the expected result:

*Main> can0 (\x -> Just x) 1
True

But, when I try to generalize this using MonadPlus, as follows:

can :: (MonadPlus m) => (a -> m b) -> a -> Bool
can f x = case f x of 
            mzero -> False
            _ -> True


I got a warning:

__testError.hs:31:11:
    Warning: Pattern match(es) are overlapped
             In a case alternative: _ -> ...
Ok, modules loaded: Main.

And the result is also not as intended (see also can0):

*Main> can (\x -> Just x) 1
False


Can anyone help to explain why this wouldn't work or if there is a workaround to use Monadplus and mzero (or Monad and fail) to achieve this?


Thanks in advance for your help

Ting

 		 	   		  
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