All Monads are Functors

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,
I know we have discussed this before, I am just posting this so that
it does not appear that the "community" does not care.  Here is a
summary of why I think Functor should be a super class of Monad.  The
extra code that a programmer would have to write is very small:

> instance Functor MyMonad where fmap f m = do { x <- m; return (f x) }
> (or use liftM)

Furthermore, I don't think I have defined a new monad for ages,
instead I use a library which already has all the necessary instances.

The benefit of having Functor as a super class of Monad shows up in
polymorhic code: we can reduce contexts like '(Functor m, Monad m)' to
just 'Monad m'.  Currently I sometimes use 'liftM' (or the 'do' form
like above) instead of using 'fmap' just to avoid having the extra
constraints, which probably makes my code less readable.

-Iavor

On 8/13/06, Lennart Augustsson <lennart at augustsson.net> wrote:
> If I remember right, Functor was a superclass of Monad in Haskell
> early on, but it was taken away.  I think this was the wrong
> decision, but I seem to remember that the rationale was that it would
> be too onerous to require programmers to write a Functor instance
> every time they want a Monad instance.  Bah!
>
>         -- Lennart