Proposal: add new function "check" to Control.Monad

[Jon Fairbairn]

Sebastian Fischer <sebf at informatik.uni-kiel.de> writes:

> On Aug 26, 2009, at 7:52 PM, Jon Fairbairn wrote:
>
>> When designing a library, one should choose
>> the primitives so that future definitions are simple, both in
>> the complexity of the terms needed to define them and in the
>> thought needed to define them, rather than the simplicity of
>> definition of the primitives themselves. The reason that I
>> suggested check is that it seems to me that it gives both of
>> those things in a way that guard doesn't
>
> I see. Also the type of guard is indeed unusual.
> Historically, guard seems inspired by conditions in list
> comprehensions but I would  appreciate a sensible
> refactoring.
>
> When designing MonadPlus combinators from scratch I would
> probably implement
>
>   filter :: MonadPlus m => (a -> Bool) -> m a -> m a
>
> as a generalisation of the list function with the same name.
> After Davids remarks I'm not sure whether I would need
>
>   check f = filter f . return

Now that /is/ a simple definition that would argue against inclusion of
check.

> I agree to you reasoning to prefer check over guard but go
> one step further and prefer filter over check.

I would be happy with that.

> I would vote for adding a generalized filter to Control.Monad. Using
> the name of the Prelude function on lists is justified because it is a
> generalisation just like many functions in Data.Foldable which also
> reuse Prelude names.

Were I designing this stuff from scratch, I'd go the same way (actually,
I'd want to restore monad comprehensions too), but there is currently an
explicit naming scheme in Control.Monad, under which the name would be
mfilter, so I think (in the absence of renaming fmap to map, which I
would also strongly prefer -- etc) we should use the name mfilter for
the time being.

In view of this, I reckon I should change the proposal and reset the
time limit.  What's the procedure for this?

-- 
Jón Fairbairn                                 Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk