[Haskell-cafe] Name for the following combinators?

[Tom Ellis]

On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 07:06:26PM +0000, Tom Ellis wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 06:50:15PM +0100, Hans Höglund wrote:
> > According to [1], Wrap/Compose does indeed have a Monad instance terms
> > of traverse (here called 'swap').  As far as I understand the paper
> > includes a proof that all the Monad laws holds for such as composition
> >
> > [1]: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/RR-1004.pdf, page 9
> 
> Careful, they mention in Section 6.4 that "this construction only yields a
> composite monad if m has a certain commutativity property".
> 
> This is the same reason that 'ListT m' is not a monad unless 'm' is
> commutative.
> 
> What is your use case for these combinators?  Perhaps you are using them
> exactly in a commutative case.

Having thought about your original question some more, I think the best
approach would be to use a free monad like this

    import Control.Monad.Free

    data F m n a = L (m a) | R (n a)
    type Wrap m n = Free (F m n)

so then 'Wrap m n' genuinely is a monad, and you can write a function

    condense :: (Monad m, Monad n, Traversable n, ...) => Wrap m n a -> m (n a)

to collect up the results at the end.  Then we need not bother to check
whether anything satisfies any laws.  'condense' is similar to your original
'mjoin'.

Tom

(PS This is overkill for the current discussion, but: since you're starting
with 'm' and 'n' monads anyway, using a free monad transformer
(Control.Monad.Trans.Free) would probably reduce the boilerplate needed in
'condense'.)