[Haskell-cafe] do-notation for building monoid values

Olaf Klinke olf at aatal-apotheke.de
Thu Mar 8 13:02:16 UTC 2018


Dear cafe, 

prompted by a discussion with the author of blaze-markup [1] I realized a pattern and would like to know whether other haskellers have exploited this/find this useful: 

For every monoid m, the types Writer m () and m are isomorphic as types via tell and execWriter. Moreover, Writer m is a monad if and only if m is a monoid. For every monad t, the type t () is a monoid with 
   mempty = return ()
   mappend = (>>). 
In the particular case of Writer m () and m, the isomorphism of Haskell types is in fact an isomorphism of monoids, that is, the functions tell and execWriter preserve the monoid operations. 

This enables us to use do-notation in building complicated values of any monoid type, e.g. Text or any other syntax. Instead of writing

complicatedValue = component1 <>
  component2 <>
  modifier (component3 <> component4)

one can write

complicatedValue = execWriter $ do
  component1
  component2
  modifier $ do 
    component3
    component4

Should such an idiom be encouraged/discouraged? How do you handle the construction of monoid values (especially text-like) with interspersed function applications (e.g. show, prettyprint)?

Regards,
Olaf

[1] https://github.com/jaspervdj/blaze-markup/issues/36


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