State of DData

[Simon Marlow]

> > Arguably then, anything which is an instance of Monad 
> should be a monad.
> 
> I would certainly argue strongly for that.
> 
> If it ain't true, then small, irrelevant changes in a piece 
> of code could 
> break.  For example, is it safe to make this change:
> 
>   do
>     f y
> ==>
>   do
>     x <- f y
>     return x
> 
> I'd hope it would be.  (And the change might be useful if I 
> want to insert a check or a debugging printf in the code.)

I'm afraid it isn't true that all instances of Monad respect the monad
laws, due to our old friend seq.  See:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2002-May/009622.html


I don't want this discussion to get out of hand.  The only point I'm
making here is that the Haskell definition doesn't *require* that every
instance of (==) be equality, in the same way that it doesn't *require*
that all Monad instances are monads, and all '+'s are additions etc.

Libraries might rely on properties of these methods, but as far as is
practical those assumptions should be documented.

Cheers,
	Simon