(Co/Contra)Functor and Comonad

Mario Blažević mblazevic at stilo.com
Wed Dec 29 17:17:20 CET 2010


On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 04:43:24PM -0500, Mario Blažević wrote:
> > Why are Cofunctor and Comonad classes not a part of the base library?
>
> Base is already too large IMO. Why do these classes /need/ to be in
> base, rather than another package?
>


Classes in general /need/ to be declared in an easy to find and
unambiguously recommended place. Otherwise people either won't declare their
instances, or will declare incompatible classes themselves. Class
dependencies also won't be declared, because nobody would go to the trouble
of declaring a more generic type that depends on a class nobody's heard of.

The best place according to the "unambiguously recommended and easy to find"
criteria is the base library. The next best would be a Hackage library with
minimal dependencies, whose name exactly corresponds to the class -
contrafunctor or control-contrafunctor, for example. This solution would be
good enough for anybody (including myself) who already knows they need to
declare or use a class instance, but most people would remain unaware of
them.
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