monad library

[Iavor Diatchki]

hello,

Andrew J Bromage wrote:
>>1. there are the map* functions for different transformers (mapReader, 
>>mapWriter, etc.). does anyone use them for anything?  while there is 
>>something common between them, i am not quite sure exactly what it is.
> 
> 
> I've used them once, and that was to swap the underlying monad of a
> transformer.  It's occasionally handy, for example, when you want your
> state to be backtrackable for a small part of your code, to stick a
> backtracking monad _under_ the top monad transformer.
> 
> I don't think that you can duplicate this behaviour using the other
> operations on the monad.
> 
> A simple solution would be to introduce this typeclass:
> 
> 	class (MonadTrans t) => MonadMapTrans t where
> 	    mapTrans :: (m a -> n b) -> (t m a -> t n b)

i think this type doesn't quite work as often the underlying computation 
returns a more complicated type (e.g. the state monad also returns a new 
state).  in my other library i had a similar operation, corresponding to 
the fact that most monad transformers are functors on the category of 
monads.  it works for all transformers except for continuations:

class MondaTrans t => MapTrans t where
   mapTrans :: (Monad m, Monad n) => (forall a. m a -> n a) -> t m b -> 
t n b

intuitively the "forall" constraint says that we are changing just the 
monad, and not touching the value. to get continuations to work, one 
needs a map (n a -> m a) as well, i think.   any comments about that class?

bye
iavor



-- 
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| Iavor S. Diatchki, Ph.D. student               |
| Department of Computer Science and Engineering |
| School of OGI at OHSU                          |
| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki               |
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