[Haskell] Mixing monadic and non-monadic functions

[Frederik Eaton]

> I have another proposal, though. Introduce a new keyword, which I'll
> call "borrow" (the opposite of "return"), that behaves like a
> function of type (Monad m) => m a -> a inside of do statements. More
> precisely, a do expression of the form
> 
>      do { ... ; ... borrow E ... ; ... }
> 
> is transformed into
> 
>      do { ... ; x <- E ; ... x ... ; ... }
>
> where x is a fresh variable. If more than one borrow form appears in
> the same do statement, they are pulled out from left to right, which
> matches the convention already used in liftM2, ap, mapM, etc.

I think this is a good idea. I like the inline "<-", or maybe
something like "@".

I'm not sure what you intend to do about nested "do" statements,
though. If they correspond to different monads, I might want to have a
'borrow' in the inner "do" statement create a lifted expression in the
outer "do" statement. Furthermore, I might want to have a lifted
expression in the outer "do" create something which needs to be
evaluated again in the monad of the inner "do" to produce the final
value.

In any case, it would certainly be good to have better support for
lifting; and something which doesn't weaken the type system is likely
to be implemented before something that does is, so I am in favor of
investigation along the lines of your proposal.

Frederik

-- 
http://ofb.net/~frederik/