darcs patch: Control.Monad: +void :: f a -> f ()

[Tyson Whitehead]

On January 8, 2010 16:53:07 gwern0 at gmail.com wrote:
> Fri Jan  8 16:44:55 EST 2010  gwern0 at gmail.com
>   * Control.Monad: +void :: f a -> f ()
> See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3292
> Turns m a -> m (). Lets one call functions for their side-effects without
> having to get rid of their return values with '>> return ()'. Very useful
> in many contexts (parsing, IO etc.); particularly good for 'forkIO' and
> 'forM_', as they demand return types of 'IO ()' though most interesting IO
> functions return non-().

I was wondering why forM_ cares about the return type, but then, when I 
checked the type signature, it seems to me like it doesn't

 forM_ :: Monad m => [a] -> (a -> m b) -> m ()

Perhaps forkIO and friends should be like this as well.  Replace them with 
something like the following

 forkIO . (>> return ()) :: IO a -> IO ThreadId

(presumably this would be optimized away?)

Cheers!  -Tyson

PS:  Note that I'm not saying there should be a void function, just wondering 
why all these functions that don't care about return type force it to be ()?
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