All Monads are Functors

Benjamin Franksen benjamin.franksen at bessy.de
Sat Aug 26 19:28:58 EDT 2006


Jon Fairbairn wrote:

> On 2006-08-25 at 19:09PDT Ashley Yakeley wrote:
>> Jon Fairbairn wrote:
>> 
>>  > There has been discussion in the past about whether Monad
>>  > should be defined as
>>  >
>>  >> class Functor m => Monad m where ...
>> 
>> It's more complicated now that we have Ross Patterson's "Applicative".
>> 
>>
http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/current/docs/libraries/base/Control-Applicative.html
> 
> FSVO "complicated"... it looks like a Good Thing to me,
> although I don't like the names much.

Yes, I liked the original name 'Idiom' better. It bears some similarity
to 'Monad' in that it has this mysterious quality that immediately made me
curious... 8-) 'Applicative' might be somewhat more descriptive, and thus
slightly better from a purely technical POV, however, it is quite an ugly
name for such a beautiful concept.

Cheers,
Ben



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